 Children will not pretend to be enjoying books, and they will not read books because they have been told that these books are good. They are looking for delight. |
| I was always influenced by language. |
| I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all. |
| I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there. |
| It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed. |
| A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into. |
| Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear. |
| Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words. |
| My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint. |
| I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me. |
| Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present. |
| If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us. |
| Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children. |
| The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it. |
| I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing. |
| As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates. |
| To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation. |
| Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive. |
| However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned. |
| When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is. |
