I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

Ten thousand pounds is the legal value of a negligently taken life, of a child or a parent. A cold and somewhat mean-spirited calculation: you would do better if you slipped on a paving-stone and broke a front tooth.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

I wanted to be a war reporter - scrabbling around, exposing things. I didn't want to go to university, I wanted to get a job, but Auntie Beryl said I should go to Oxford.

I dislike the word 'victim.' I dislike being told that I 'lost' my husband - as if I had idly abandoned you by the side of the railway track like an unwanted pair of old shoes.

I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.