Anthony Horowitz

I don't think my father was a bad man, all in all.

I love writing different things.

I didn't really have a favourite subject at school as I was useless at everything.

I enjoy scaring people.

I'm a private victim of a peculiar household.

I'm not good at the modern world.

If you look at Charles Dickens's time, there were so many different levels of society and everybody understood their place in it, it was that complex and simple. I'm not sure we have that now.

I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.

I don't really like the word 'hobbies.'

Sometimes I think the family I was brought up in was 100 years out of date.

Until he lost all his money, my father was a successful north London Jewish businessman. He was unusual among his immediate family in that he was enormously cultured and had an incredible library.

If my children were as unhappy as I was at school, I'd send them somewhere else, but it never occurred to my parents.

Writing about magic is harder than writing about spies because you're dealing with something that doesn't really exist.

With every year that passes, I get further away from my target audience, and while I've been happy to think of myself as a father figure to these kids, I'd be a little distressed to be thought of as a grandfather figure.

My generation has left the globe in a mess.

Relationships between writers and publishers are of course very strange and change all the time, rather like a see-saw.

Everywhere, publishers are being squeezed out.

You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.

I do believe quite strongly in evil.

No writer can really sustain two huge - I hate the word 'franchises.'

If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.

You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world.

I feel very privileged to have reached so many kids because a life without stories, without the power of books, would be a very grey world, it's good to add colour.

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

Authors have odd relationships with their creations They owe their fame and fortune to their characters but feel enslaved by them.