I believe that, by and large, people are good and everybody you meet is more likely to surprise you in a positive way than in a negative way.Collection: Positive
Once you get into the world of dystopia, it's hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful visions.
I love the idea that magic and witchcraft and battles between supernatural creatures could be raging all around us but just out of our sight.
I'm not a huge fan of prequels and sequels and the cynical rush to make money on the back of books by other writers who are now dead.
My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.
A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
Authors have odd relationships with their creations They owe their fame and fortune to their characters but feel enslaved by them.
I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.
As a children's author, reviewers are generally very nice to you. I only ever wrote one adult book and received such a kicking for it that I was in trauma for the next six months.
There's something very strange about Sherlock Holmes, especially if you're an English schoolboy. When you read the stories, they stay with you forever.
My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.
I vividly remember being 14. That was the age when I started to get happy: I started being a writer and stopped being a loser.
Writing about magic is harder than writing about spies because you're dealing with something that doesn't really exist.
If you look at Charles Dickens's time, there were so many different levels of society and everybody understood their place in it, it was that complex and simple. I'm not sure we have that now.
Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.
My wife, Jill, and I have an incredibly close working relationship, and an incredibly happy married one. We met through work. I was the world's worst advertising copywriter. She had the misfortune to be my account director, so from the very start she was my boss, and she still is.
If my children were as unhappy as I was at school, I'd send them somewhere else, but it never occurred to my parents.
With every year that passes, I get further away from my target audience, and while I've been happy to think of myself as a father figure to these kids, I'd be a little distressed to be thought of as a grandfather figure.
Relationships between writers and publishers are of course very strange and change all the time, rather like a see-saw.
You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.
If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.
You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world.
I feel very privileged to have reached so many kids because a life without stories, without the power of books, would be a very grey world, it's good to add colour.
We live in an age when there is no room for the impossible.Collection: Age
Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.Collection: Children
All that sadness. All that anger. It is the smoke that gets into your eyes. If you do not blow it away, how can you hope to see?Collection: Sadness