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

No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Many childrens writers dont have children of their own

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.

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.