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I love writing different things.
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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.
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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.
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I have a great belief in not doing anything unless I'm passionate about it.
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Sometimes I think the family I was brought up in was 100 years out of date.
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I do believe quite strongly in evil.
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I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.
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Everywhere, publishers are being squeezed out.
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It's hard to write when you think every sentence is going to be read by a million kids.
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I start work at 7 A.M. and write all day, seven days a week. If I don't write, I can't sleep.
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No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'
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I'm a private victim of a peculiar household.
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If my children were as unhappy as I was at school, I'd send them somewhere else, but it never occurred to my parents.
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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.
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Do I believe in the devil? I don't believe in a figure with horns and a tail.
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My father was aloof, very strange and very distant.
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Relationships between writers and publishers are of course very strange and change all the time, rather like a see-saw.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My perfect reader doesn't just read - he or she devours books.
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My greatest fear is disappointing the reader, so each book has to be better than the one before.