Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.