I Have Stolen Ideas From Every Book

I Was Born In Norwich In 1946, And Educated In England, Zimbabwe, And Australia, Before My Family Settled In North Wales.

There Are Some Themes, Some Subjects, Too Large For Adult Fiction; They Can Only Be Dealt With Adequately In A Children's Book.

Everything Means Something.

This Is The Value For Me Of Writing Books That Children Read. Children Aren't Interested In Your Appalling Self-consciousness. They Want To Know What Happens Next. They Force You To Tell A Story.

I Feel With Some Passion That What We Truly Are Is Private, And Almost Infinitely Complex, And Ambiguous, And Both External And Internal, And Double- Or Triple- Or Multiply Natured, And Largely Mysterious Even To Ourselves; And Furthermore That What We Are Is Only Part Of Us, Because Identity, Unlike "identity", Must Include What We Do. And I Think That To Find Oneself And Every Aspect Of This Complexity Reduced In The Public Mind To One Property That Apparently Subsumes All The Rest ("gay", "black", "muslim", Whatever) Is To Be The Victim Of A Piece Of Extraordinary Intellectual Vulgarity.