Author

It was weird - writing is a stupid thing to do. I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I'm a black South American football superstar; then I have to imagine I'm a female pop celebrity who's pregnant. It's a completely mad way to spend your time.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

I didn't consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn't think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.

Football is a bit like chess: it's not just the piece being moved that matters; it's also the effect that move has on all the other pieces.

'Keeper' is about fathers, ultimately. and also conservation, commitment and ambition.

A sentence that clots in your mouth is unlikely to flow in your mind.

Bootworks' Black Box Theatre has a maximum seating capacity of two - as long as one of you is happy to sit on the other's lap.

Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to.

'Smart', in American usage, is slicker and sharper than 'intelligent'; faster off the mark and quicker on its feet than deep thought.

It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.

When I'm working, I always read stuff that's as far away from what I'm working on as possible, so I'll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.

I'm going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It's like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he's stuck - in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.

I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.

I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.

Writing is a form of licensed madness.

I have kind of a personality defect in that I find the word 'no' hard to articulate.

I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.

Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children's writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull.

I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.

It's a nonsense because, as we all know, there are brilliant 15-year-old readers and hopeless 50-year-old readers. All that categorisation is a matter of bookshop shelves rather than literary categories, I think.