I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

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

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different even if there's a risk of it going wrong.

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