Photography is without mercy -- though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.

I make up names for people all the time -- it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.

I think lots of boys sat down with 'The Three Musketeers' and felt it was a really long book, but then discovered that it's a really gripping swashbuckling story.

Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.

I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind.

Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.

Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

A whooping woman in an evening gown is a woman to delight in.

It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source.

I have wrangles with Facebook, entered fictitious trips because I can't get the map to get off my page, don't want people to know where I live. It is possible to carve out a space that's your own.

Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.

There is a sense that everything should be easy, but easy decisions are the ones we should be scared of because if they're easy then we're probably being sold something. This is why I'm worried about nudge -- it's pushing people in the direction of what you think they should be doing. Easy decisions are dangerous ones.

E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page.

My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.

A warsheep would be a cross between a dolphin and a small, limber elephant.

To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.

Perhaps there was another life, not so sad, that I missed somehow this time, and will have in another world.

The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

The great thing is to have been surrounded by stories all my life.