No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

B is for bestseller.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.