"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."

"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."

"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."

"Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety, and there are people out there who don't. I'm to some extent rather jealous of them."

"The belief in immortality rests not very much on the hope of going on. Few of us want to do that, but we would like very much to begin again."

"I have a crazy amount of different jobs, so the way I manage that is to not do more than one at a time. It's like old computers that had small memory chips, they would do something called swapping, where they would fill the memory with one task, do it and get it out."

"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act."

"There was a real fear that a euro-zone bank might fail, that we'd have a sovereign debt problem in one of the larger European economies. That's dissipated, thanks largely to the action of the European Central Bank."