Novelist Quotes

Many children's writers don't have children of their own.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

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.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

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.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.

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.

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.

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.

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

B is for bestseller.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.

What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.