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.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

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.

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

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

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.

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