I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
From Mark Haddon
If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.
Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.
What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.
I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'
5 perspectives
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