A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.
Nobody gets a nervous breakdown or a heart attack from selling kerosene to gentle country folk from the back of a tanker in Somerset.
All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can't swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.
Unless you have been to boarding-school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.
Pain was something we were expected to endure. But I doubt very much if you would be entirely happy today if a doctor threw a towel in your face and jumped on you with a knife.
Had I not had children of my own, I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so.
I am only 8 years old, I told myself. No little boy of 8 has ever murdered anyone. It's not possible.
I go down to my little hut, where it's tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.
Prayers were held in Assembly Hall. We all perched in rows on wooden benches while teachers sat up on the platform in armchairs, facing us.
My father was a Norwegian who came from a small town near Oslo. He broke his arm at the elbow when he was 14, and they amputated it.
The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.