"That's why I'm grumpy all the time. Absolutely. Because your ideal never happens. Nothing ever goes ..." — Sheila Hancock

I love being in my car with Radio 3 on.

I'm actually involved with DigiSmart, a project to get nine-11-year-olds to love books.

Inventing characters is extraordinary: proper authors say so often that characters 'just appear' and that does happen. These people keep leaping out and saying, why don't you write about me?

If you're creating a story, it's a lovely sort of secret thing going on in your head.