I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

..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.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

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.

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.

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.

People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be information, like in a computer. And their spaceships might look like clouds, or be made up of unconnected objects like dust or leaves.