Remember to write for yourself, not for a market and give yourself time to develop your own style, your own voice. It takes a lifetime. Enjoy it!

Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.

Something I learn every time I stand in front of a bunch of children, I learn never, never to underestimate them or patronise them.

The big relationships you make in your life are with those that you love and if things do go wrong then it's a source of great pain and that lasts.

To write something you have to feel it and know it, and that's not comfortable.

When I sit down I write very fast... if I haven't finished a book in two or three months then I think it's not going well.

When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.

You know, I really wish now I'd had the nerve to become an actor. Because I'd have been Robert Redford, no question.

A lot of children, like I did, move away from words because of the fear - which is something you have to take out of education: the fear of worrying about what marks you'll get, detention, worrying about letting people down, your parents, teachers.

Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and most necessary steps in education and librarians, teachers and parents all over the country know it. It is our children's right and it is also our best hope and their best hope for the future.

Encouraging young people to believe in themselves and find their own voice whether it's through writing, drama or art is so important in giving young people a sense of self-worth.

Everyone is interested in war, in that people don't want it to happen. I'm much more interested in peace than in war but it's important to understand why we fight.

I become my characters, and then try to allow events in the story to take their own course. I try not to play God, but to let them work out their own destiny.

I really can't write fantasy. I cannot invent a world which does not exist. And I can't read fantasy either. As soon as I realise I'm reading a book that hasn't got its roots in a reality I can comprehend, I switch off.

I was an overly young father, is the most polite way of putting it. I think I was rather immature and all I can say is that I think I've made a much better grandfather... I don't think I was ready to be a father to be honest.

I was brought up, as a lot of kids are, on 'Aesop's Fables,' 'Brothers Grimm,' 'La Fontaine,' all those sorts of things. Hans Christian Andersen is a hero of mine.

I was never a great reader, but there were two stories I loved best: Kipling's 'The Elephant's Child' and 'The Jungle Book.' Deep down, I've always wanted to write a book about a wild child and an elephant.

I was rather a poor student, too easily distracted - did a lot of gazing out of windows, fine for training to be a writer, but not a great way to achieve in the classroom. The truth is that I was happy to bumble along and do enough to avoid detention, but not much more.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

It gives me confidence to know that what I'm writing has a veracity of its own without me having to invent it. When I'm writing fiction, I must believe it to be true, or I can see no point in it.