..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.

Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.