You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.

He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

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