I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.

I mistrust the term graphic novel because it sounds like a good thing to put on a tee-shirt. That's why the French like them.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.

The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.

Most of my schooldays were the worst day of my life.

It looked the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed,' although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had beed badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.