Anthony horowitz

There's something very strange about Sherlock Holmes, especially if you're an English schoolboy. When you read the stories, they stay with you forever.

It's hard to write when you think every sentence is going to be read by a million kids.

As a children's author, reviewers are generally very nice to you. I only ever wrote one adult book and received such a kicking for it that I was in trauma for the next six months.

I'm not good at the modern world.

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.

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.

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...

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

My father was aloof, very strange and very distant.

Sometimes I think the family I was brought up in was 100 years out of date.