I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

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 find people confusing.

Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

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.

And Father said, "Christopher, do you understand that I love you?" And I said "Yes," because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.

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.