The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.