Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Many childrens writers dont have children of their own

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.