It Is Neither Fair Nor Unfair, Nobody

Making Fiction For Children, Making Books For Children, Isn't Something You Do For Money. It's Something You Do Because What Children Read And Learn And See And Take In Changes Them And Forms Them, And They Make The Future. They Make The World We're Going To Wind Up In, The World That Will Be Here When We're Gone. Which Sounds Preachy (and Is More Than You Need For A Quotebyte) But It's True. I Want To Tell Kids Important Things, And I Want Them To Love Stories And Love Reading And Love Finding Things Out. I Want Them To Be Brave And Wise. So I Write For Them.

I Toyed Briefly With An Image Someone Once Mentioned To Me, Of A Village In The Shadow Of A Twin-peaked Mountain. In The Morning The Sun Rises. At Lunch It Sets Behind The Mountain. In The Early Afternoon It Rises Once More. The Cocks Crow For The Second Time, And Later The Sun Sets Again. No. One Peak. Metaphors Should Not Be Belaboured.

Memory Is The Great Deceiver. Perhaps There Are Some Individuals Whose Memories Act Like Tape Recordings, Daily Records Of Their Lives Complete In Every Detail, But I Am Not One Of Them. My Memory Is A Patchwork Of Occurrences, Of Discontinuous Events Roughly Sewn Together: The Parts I Remember, I Remember Precisely, Whilst Other Sections Seemed To Have Vanished Completely.

I Think That Is Something That I Always Like In My Work - The Sense Of Inclusion Rather Than The Sense Of Otherness.

I Think Hell Is Something You Carry Around With You, Not Somewhere You Go.