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

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

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I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

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

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

Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.