For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

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.

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.