I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.
I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
I don't believe in the war god of the Israelites. He's a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.
The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.
There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.
There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.
It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.
I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.
I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.
I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
