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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.
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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.
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I don't think my father was a bad man, all in all.
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Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.
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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.
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I'm not good at the modern world.
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I didn't really have a favourite subject at school as I was useless at everything.
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I'm not happy unless I have a pen in my hand, it's really that simple.
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I enjoy scaring people.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.
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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.
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I love writing different things.
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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.
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Authors have odd relationships with their creations They owe their fame and fortune to their characters but feel enslaved by them.
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I don't really like the word 'hobbies.'
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Once you get into the world of dystopia, it's hard to avoid plagiarism, because other people have had such powerful visions.
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I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is.
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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.
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Writing about magic is harder than writing about spies because you're dealing with something that doesn't really exist.
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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.