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.

Any problem can be solved between people if only they can trust each other

You know, I really wish now I'd had the nerve to become an actor. Because I'd have been Robert Redford, no question.

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.

But try as I might, I never got to eat any of her pastries, and do you know, she never even offered me one.

Unless you can be in a place yourself and go through the subject of your story yourself, the next best thing is not to read a book about it, or see a movie about it, it's to talk to the people who've been there.

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.