I really do work in solitude.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

I think it's hard to write about children and to have an idea of innocence.

I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all - what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to s…

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

And so I penned It down, until at last it came to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see.