My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

My generation has left the globe in a mess.

My greatest fear is disappointing the reader, so each book has to be better than the one before.

My perfect reader doesn't just read - he or she devours books.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'

Once you get into the world of dystopia, it's hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful visions.

Relationships between writers and publishers are of course very strange and change all the time, rather like a see-saw.

Sometimes I think the family I was brought up in was 100 years out of date.

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

Writing about magic is harder than writing about spies because you're dealing with something that doesn't really exist.

A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.

As a children's author, reviewers are generally very nice to you. I only ever wrote one adult book and received such a kicking for it that I was in trauma for the next six months.

I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.

I feel very privileged to have reached so many kids because a life without stories, without the power of books, would be a very grey world, it's good to add colour.

If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.

If you look at Charles Dickens's time, there were so many different levels of society and everybody understood their place in it, it was that complex and simple. I'm not sure we have that now.

My wife, Jill, and I have an incredibly close working relationship, and an incredibly happy married one. We met through work. I was the world's worst advertising copywriter. She had the misfortune to be my account director, so from the very start she was my boss, and she still is.

There's something very strange about Sherlock Holmes, especially if you're an English schoolboy. When you read the stories, they stay with you forever.

With every year that passes, I get further away from my target audience, and while I've been happy to think of myself as a father figure to these kids, I'd be a little distressed to be thought of as a grandfather figure.