“I'm going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy ...” — Mal Peet Quote

“I'm going to get hated for saying this, but honestly, fantasy is easy to write because you can do anything. It's like when Raymond Chandler brings in a bloke with a gun when he's stuck - in fantasy, up pops a wizard, and off we go.”

“It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.”

“I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.”

“I was never a good-looking bloke. Not by a long chalk.”

“Baldness is visually enough of a stigma as it is without a big sweaty bloke on stage pointing it out.”

“When I interviewed a bloke wearing a balaclava on Newsnight. He refused to remove it and halfway through our interview he forgot he was wearing it, took a sip of water and couldn't find his mouth. It's quite hard to hold it together when that happens.”