It's often discouraging sitting working at home, wondering whether to put the heating on, answering the doorbell to the gas board, feeling it's all utterly pointless.

Of one thing there is no doubt: if Paris makes demands of the heart, then Munich makes demands of the stomach.

It's very hard to self-motivate without someone standing over you snarling, ready to hurl the chalk at your head at the slightest slackening.

If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.

Without my Johnson trademark mop of yellow hair, I think I would be nothing.

I talk to bankers, distributors, marketing people. I used to sit at home in my tracksuit bottoms, and the real excitement of my day would be going out to get a copy of Private Eye and a latte.

Of course I'm naughty. I've always had to compete for attention, you see.

In Germany, salads are assemblies of ham and mayonnaise, not trendy tossed leaves.

When I'm called unkind... that really cuts to the quick. You can say anything else that you like about me.

Don't worry about never having time to write. Just write what you can in the time you do have and give yourself a big clap on the back, followed by a double latte and a blueberry muffin.

I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.

What are we if we are not disciplined?

I want to be seen. I want proof I existed.

It ain't the things you don't know what gets you into trouble it's the things you know for sure what ain't so.

That definitely I feel is part of my generation: social networking, communication over the Internet, whether it's Skype or IRC or some form of text-based chat, text messaging.

It's no fun losing a tooth or getting your face whacked by a stick.

Everybody is teaching Everybody to Love at every moment.

Firstly, do not fear hardship, and secondly, do not fear death.

It's very important to keep the emotions grounded, to keep the characters in some real place.

I loved the idea of seeing the world through a boy's eyes.

'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.