“You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're...” — Jonathan Dee Quote

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

Children go from being a kind of cultural protectorate to the Junior Auxiliary of the tube-watching nation at large, and programs are designed for them on the same principle as they're designed for grown-ups: as a way to sell eyeballs to advertisers.

'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.

In order to describe a particular subculture, you might want to portray people who are typical or representative of that subculture; but to dramatize it, to make it an interesting setting for a story, you want to bring someone anomalous into that setting, to see how she conforms to it, and it to her.

Pearl Buck was my mother's favorite author.

I still pinch meself when I wake up of a morning. Who ever thought I'd be a children's author - let alone a best-selling children's author?

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

I have a huge author crush on Stephen King. Have never met him. Would probably embarrass myself. But it would be worth it.

I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.