Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of 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.

I want my name to mean me.

I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.