 B is for bestseller. |
| Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person. |
| I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier. |
| 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. |
| 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 knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there. |
| I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut. |
| As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read. |
| My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it. |
| 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. |
| 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| I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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. |
| 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. |
| For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting. |
| Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene. |
| That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary. |
| There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country. |
