The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.

I can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.

Writing is a form of licensed madness.

The three things that kept me sane as a child were bikes, books, and soccer.

What I’m trying to explain to my sulky little cousin is that we are doing things backwards. We are going from the end of the river to the start of the river. And endings are always sad. We are doing the sad bit first, which is wrong. Strange.

Fluke me, Murdstone.

Fundamentalism – of any variety – is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.

Gone are the days when you simply write a jolly good book and wait for the queues to form. Readers need to be friended, darling. They need to be subscribers. They need to be followers.

But when I stood there and saw that the end of the journey was as vague and unreachable as the beginning had been, I realized I didn’t care. No, more than that: I was relieved. I didn’t want an ending, didn’t want to get to the full stop of our story.

Philip Murdstone sat considering the phrase ‘depths of despair’. Its plural implied that there were, even now, levels of it he had yet to experience.