Quote

Being a writer - even a best-selling one - is usually not anywhere near as public as being a movie star, at least not when I'm out in 'real life' like this. Not that I don't use what fame I have, every chance I get, to help sell more books.

I don't think about being famous, really. Being an author, I don't generally get stopped as I walk down the street. It's not like being a movie star.

I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

I'm such a fangirl when it comes to other writers. I read 250 books a year, and I'm always talking up books by other authors.

I like reading a lot. Jeffrey Archer and Robert Ludlum are my favourite authors. I love making realistic cinema, so I read non-fiction more.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

I'm not the most famous guy in the world; my work is spread out across different mediums, and I never write the same kind of story and rarely even do the same character from one year to the next.

Being famous as a writer is like being famous in a village. It's not really any very heady fame.

With each book, you get better as a writer. There is no back door to the industry. Read in the genre you want to write, as the more you read, the better you will get as an author.