There's room for all sorts of magic and miracles in this world - that's what I think.

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

What's really good is that there are people making stories and writing them and the vast majority never see the light of day and it doesn't matter a fig.

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.

One of the great failings of our education system is that we tend to focus on those who are succeeding in exams, and there are plenty of them. But what we should also be looking at, and a lot more urgently, is those who fail.

I was never a great reader, but there were two stories I loved best: Kipling's The Elephant's Child and The Jungle Book. Deep down, I've always wanted to write a book about a wild child and an elephant.

If it is possible to be happy in the middle of a nightmare, then Topthorn and I were happy that summer.