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.

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

Like most writers, I sit in a room and scribble a story and you don't have a connection with the people who take your story, whether it be to the stage or to the screen.

I spend months, sometimes years, doing what I call dreamtime, weaving it together inside my head. But when I actually feel that the egg of my story is ready to hatch, then I can write it in three months. Then I know the landscape and the people well and from the inside, but I don't necessarily know where the story is going to take us.

I can hate you more, but I'll never love you less.

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

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?