Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I find people confusing.
I want my name to mean me.
Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
You love someone, you've got to let something go.
I think good books have to make a few people angry.
Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything
Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.
The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.
Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.
...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.
Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end
The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'
I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.
All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.
He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.