Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.
Africa was full of strange things.
And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?
And in one way my life hasn't changed since then. I still write three pages every day, and I suppose I will till the day I die.
And it was at Oxford that I decided that my real goal was not writing poetry but storytelling.
Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.
Art was for those who weren't clever. If you were clever, you had to do Latin. I don't regret the Latin, but I do regret missing the art.
At the award ceremony for that prize, which I was very proud to receive, I promised to spend my time in future making fewer speeches and writing more books.
Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit.
But it wasn't long before I found out that I didn't enjoy English as much as I'd thought I would, anyway. I was doing it because I wanted to learn how to write, but that wasn't what they were interested in teaching.
But one thing they didn't have in Africa was fried bread. Granny used to make fried bread, and I missed it, and I was glad to go home to England when my father's tour of duty ended if only to taste fried bread again.
Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.
For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence.
I always liked girls. At one point I wanted to be a girl myself, and I even picked a name: I was going to be Margot.
I discovered a method that's worked for me ever since: to write three pages every day, no more, no less.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.
I learned enormous amounts of poetry by heart; I developed a great respect for craftsmanship.
I learned that landscape by drawing it, and I came to care for it with a lover's devotion.
I wanted to smoke like the grown-ups, so my father bought me a packet of ten cigarettes. I suppose he hoped I'd get so sick I'd never want another one, but I smoked them all one after the other and loved them.
I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales.
I was fifteen when I became interested in the history of painting.
I'd been a reader for a long time, but a reader of books; I'd never known comics.
I've also written a number of shorter stories which, for want of a better term, I call fairy tales.
I've published nearly twenty books, mostly of the sort that are read by children, though I'm happy to say that the natural audience for my work seems to be a mixed one - mixed in age, that is, though the more mixed in every other way as well, the better.
If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.
In Australia I made a great discovery. TV hadn't yet reached Australia, but everyone listened to the radio, and the drama serials used to keep us enthralled.'
Many other things happened in Australia, but my discovery of storytelling was by far the most important.
Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.
My father was in the Royal Air Force, and when I was six he was posted to Southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe.
My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature.
My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.
No one in my family had ever been to university before, never mind Oxford or Cambridge, but I wanted to go, and that was that.
One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.
So I didn't enjoy my English course, and I didn't get a good degree, but it wasn't entirely a waste of time. I got drunk; I played the guitar; I made some good friends, some of whom are still speaking to me.
That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
There were two kinds of glamour: my mother's, which consisted of a scent called Blue Grass by Elizabeth Arden, and my father's, which was more complicated.
True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
What I should have done, I realise now, was go to art school and learn to paint and to draw.
When I was teaching, I was free to decide what I should do and how I should do it, and one of the things I decided was that the pupils in my classes should learn about Greek mythology.
When I'm not writing books I like to draw and to make things out of wood.
When the time came to apply for university, I was in no doubt about what I wanted to study: it was English, of course.
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