John Boyne

“But once, in his anger, Aidan had asked me whether I thought I had wasted my life, and I had told him no. No, I had not. But I had been wrong. And Tom Cardle has been right. For I had known everything, right from the start, and never acted on any of it. I had blocked it from my mind time and again, refused to recognize what was staring me in the face. I had said nothing when I should have spoken out, convincing myself that I was a man of higher character. I had been complicit in all their crimes, and people had suffered because of me. I had wasted my life. I had wasted every moment of my life. And the final irony was that it had taken a convicted pedophile to show me that in my silence, I was just as guilty as the rest of them.”

“I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.”

“I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder.”

“I am opposed to war, to killing people, to any kind of hatred and violence.”

“Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.”

“Neither your mother nor I have any imagination at all and we certainly didn't bring you up to have one”

“I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.”

“People try to glorify war, particularly those who aren't actually fighting in them. People tend to make heroes of those who are fighting in them.”

“War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.”

“What makes a classic is difficult to define. It's entirely subjective, of course. And the term is employed far too promiscuously.”

“He didn't want to play football. He wanted to be told the truth.”

“Unless you're very boring, I think most people who've lived long enough have something in their past which will never go away.”

“The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - too sad story. This book is very good and sad”

“It's not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing.”

“Don't make it worse by thinking it's more painful than it actually is.”

“What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?”

“Children's authors don't talk down or patronise their younger readers.”

“He pushed his two feet together and shot his right arm in the air before clicking his two heels together and saying in a deep and clear voice as possible the words he said every time he left a soldiers presence. 'Heil Hitler,' he said, which, he presumed, was another way of saying, 'Well, goodbye for now, have a pleasant afternoon'.”

“I move between the two: I write an adult novel, and then I write a children's book. I quite enjoy that. It's a nice change of pace each time.”

“I suppose books are my real passion in life.”