People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

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.

People's lives are in the care of the railways when they get on a train. The railways should remember that.

I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine.

I would hate to live in the country, unless I was living on a farm.

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.