I think people are more in contact now with the consequences of war than they've been for a very long time. And that's what amazes me when sometimes politicians seem to forget their history. They don't look and re-learn about what has happened before. Maybe they haven't got the memory, maybe they're already too young, but you can see how we become puffed up, and how we as a nation rise so quickly if we're not careful.

Books that kids read should be about what is going on in the world.

Stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions.

Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.

Elephants are my favourite creatures and have been since I was a boy and my mother read Kipling's The Elephant's Child to me. It was loving elephants so much that made we want to write my own story with an elephant at the centre and its bond with a child.

There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.