YouSaid · the spoken record

Anthony Horowitz

lines on the record: 40
first: 2006-12-31
most recent: 2006-12-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Oh dear Let's go back on that, then I can't bear the notion of killing my own poor dog. I'm going to be very boring then and ask you for what is so obvious, Women. I'll take my fountain pen, but you're also going to have to give me a very large amount of paper and some ink, our copious amounts of both.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When he is going to die quite soon, I mean he's very old and so I thought I could have him stuffed and have him there or turn him into a hat, perhaps.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really think if I'm going to be stuck there for any length of time, I'm going to need to improve myself, so I'm not going to take fiction or anything too enjoyable. What I'd like is a large French dictionary so I can improve my French and feel that if I was rescued or rather when I am rescued, I'd actually learn something and done something, and of course I could thank my rescuers in pretty fluent French.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spend a great deal of time in Suffolk, where I'm probably at my happiest. I absolutely love it up there, particularly in Orford, a village on the coast, which is where I go to write and where I feel comfortable, even if most of the residents do seem to be drunk most of the time, it is still a wonderful place to go, and I can't go to Suffolk without thinking of Benjamin Britton, who is buried at Aubridge just down the coast and whose work was often premiered in Orford, and I once went to a semi professional production of an opera called Albert Herring in St. Bartholomew's Church in Orford. It's a very light, rather silly opera in many ways, but in the middle of it.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you need adversity? Do you need misfortune to succeed? No, I don't think you do, and I don't think for a minute that my children will. We'll be either boring or unhappy in their later years. To an extent I try not to look forward. I think it's very dangerous for a father to sort of have too many ideas about what their kids are going to be or to do. You know, my job is to get them to eighteen well educated and sort of rounded and basically nice people. I think I've done that. What happens next? You know, they can't disappoint me if I don't have too many expectations for them, and you know, they're on their own from that, I'll always be there for them, but after this point they're sort of on their own.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh horribly when I go and visit them at their school, I just seave with envy and jealousy, and they're so young and healthy and they've got such attractive friends, girls and guys, and you know they're so sporty and they're doing so well, I just sit there green with envy and anger.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a wonderful question. I'm very happy with the way things have turned out in my life. I really am, and I don't think I'd have changed anything of it much, really, and it's difficult to answer the question honestly because of a time going through Orley Farm and being so. unhappy with myself and what I was maybe it would have been better but I wouldn't have known what would have happened next and what's happened next for me has been so good Alex Rider and the other books and all the rest of it that one goes with the other so I wouldn't have changed anything I suppose.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going back to theatre again I still have very strong memories going with my sister Caroline to see guys and dolls many, many years ago at the National Theatre quite simply the most wonderful evening of going to theatre I think I've ever had, and it occurs to me that this song sit down you're rocking the boat following a storm is again good music for a desert island.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a fair point, you know, there are too many detectives on television, but television as itself shifting so much and changing so terribly in so many different ways to complain about the amount of murder on television is a bit like complaining about how many ice cubes there were on board the Titanic. It's sort of a very small part of a much bigger picture and a picture which is not a very happy one”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When Mitama murdered her I haven't written now for many years was really just an excuse to revisit in England which of course never really existed in the first place. But you know I'm much more proud of the work I've done now on Foil's war, where again these aren't really murder stories at all. Yes, there's a murder every week, but in Foyle's war the murder is always almost irrelevant because we're talking about stories that interest me much, much more about the Second World War and the Home Front and the RAF and all the different characters around that time. You know, the murder is the excuse. Let's get now to the real story.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No none at all. I mean murder has been used by every great writer since writing began as an excuse for a story. What I'm writing about is something quite different the murder is if you like only an excuse for it.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh this is another piece of religious music, although modern classical. One of the few regrets I have in my long career is that I was invited to write a play for the National Youth Theatre many, many years ago on Crystal Night, and I still regret to this day not doing it Ed Wilson, the director invited me, and it was one of the very few mistakes I have made, and he played me a piece of music to inspire me, and that is the piece of music I am going to play now, which is go down Moses from Sir Michael Tippet's A Child in our time.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I write every single day certainly, sometimes up to about ten hours a day, never less than about five, but as I say, you know, people say how you so disciplined, but discipline is stopping, not starting. I love what I do, therefore I have to remind myself at some stage in Madeva there is a world out there, but I do have a family I have even got one or two friends here and there, and that I should get out and see them. So that's how I work.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the nineteen eighties, of course, famously a boom time in advertising. Were you a good copywriter? No, I wasn't a very good copywriter. Most of my lines tended to rhyme like our Tanzentors and you can't say no to which he pato or would quiet desperation air lingers please ring us we didn't get that account so I wasn't very good, I'm afraid I never had any interest in the products that was the trouble and I was only doing it really to Mark Time while my novels took off”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me Billy Joel, and she's always a woman memories of some of those fresh dates with your wife Jill. You were working at the time in advertising. That's how we met, yes, she was the account director and I was a copywriter and it was one of those sort of mutual hatred at first sight, in fact. She demanded he be taken off any accounts I was working on and I did my best to avoid her, and yet at the same time I knew I think from the first time I met her that I would marry her that we would get married. I don't know why she was just sort of stronger and more special than anyone I ever met. What did she hate about you? Oh, everything, my arrogance, I think she said, and the fact that I was so sort of determined in my writing that it had to be done my way and I wouldn't listen to anybody else and all that sort of thing and my dress sense also, which he quickly got to work on but it didn't last long. We went on a date to Alton Towers, our very first ever date was Alton Towers. I have a love of fun fairs and we got friendly there.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“now, and I think that probably I would not survive long on this island without her would need something to remember her by, and this song Billy Joel, she's always a woman, was I think playing the very first time we met, and whenever I hear it anyway, perhaps it's the lyrics I always think of her.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think both of us were happier in that time than we had ever been before yet she loved actually earning her own money and saving up for little treats and then really enjoying those treats, and it really taught me something about wanting and about needing and about how good for you that can be. Given that you were writing so early in your life, it seems that almost the purpose of writing was to cut yourself off from the childhood that you've had. Would that be a fair analysis? When I began writing at school, that was true. When I began writing to be published, it was to entertain people. Purely and simply, nothing more than that. You know, I never in my entire life wrote a single word to earn money. That's never been the point of writing for me. The point of writing is to tell stories and to have fun. And what's your next record? Well, the greatest mainstay of my life has been Jill Green, who is the producer of Foil's War, to whom I should also add I am married and have been for seventeen.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“he never saw me published, which does make me sad because, you know, he didn't ever encourage me very much, and I would have liked to have shown him I could do it. My mother, on the other hand, was absolutely thrilled. She used to say that every bad character I invented was based on her, which wasn't true. Ah, but she loved it, and she loved the excitement of it and seeing the books and my shops. She was the first one to be going into the shops and pulling them off from the bottom shelf and putting them on the tables. You said that your mother then had to go on this journey of trying to unpick his finances and there were lots of bills that needed paying and that she didn't know how to get hold of your father's money to pay the bills. Did you feel in any way robbed of this life that you'd had? I mean, you'd lived a very lavish lifestyle up until then No, because the life that I lost wasn't actually a life I hadn't particularly enjoyed, so losing it didn't bother me at all on the contrary. My mother and I spent five or six years living in Stamor. We sold everything and she bought a very little cottage and went back to work”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You and McGregor, Jose Feliciano, and Yatsik Comen singing El Tango de Roxanne from the soundtrack of Moulin Rouge and images of you there Anthony Horowitz on the desert island dancing naked under the palm trees. You had your first novel published at the age of twenty two. What was it about? It was about a very, very rich and unpleasant boy, isn't that a surprise, who sort of takes over the world? So at twenty two, I mean a young age to have it first published, and suddenly Hollywood came calling at the same time. That's right, I mean, it was all very strange. I mean, why did I write a children's book in the first place to this day I don't know, other than that it was wet and I was bored and then yes, Disney optioned the book, I mean nothing came of it, but there was a time when suddenly every producer in Hollywood seemed to be holding my book and I was out there for two or three weeks writing the screenplay and it was like a weird dream which sort of burst quite suddenly and I woke up and I was back in London again, but it was an interesting start. So there was their son a published novelist at the age of twenty two. What did your parents make of that? Well, unfortunately my father was already dead.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“about helping with jokes and his great on structure, and if a paragraph is boring he'll be the first person to tell me, both for the kids are great and they're fearless. They won't hold back if they don't like what I'm doing. What's your next record? This is a slightly odd one. I'm a great fan of Bas Lerman, the Australian director, and one of my favourite films of his is Munar Rouge, and although some of your listeners, I fear may find this sort of a slightly unpleasant noise, it's a piece of music which I just love, and I can see myself on the island are dancing naked under the palm trees to the sound of the tango out of Moon Rouge.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Storytelling there was never any doubt in my mind it helps that I'm no good at anything else, you know, so it wasn't exactly a sort of a huge amount of choices being dangled in front of me it was right or poverty and I think I chose well. What is the feeling you get? What was the feeling then and now you get when you're writing? Huge pleasure more than you can begin to imagine. I mean I write with a pen and ink and I love the scratch of the nib on the paper. I love watching the words form. I love it when phrases come together in your mind and when a sentence works out well I love the rhythm of the books, I love the stories, I love the surprises. It is just the most enormous fun writing for me. It always has been always will be a real passion. So the process of writing is one which gives me enormous and sustained pleasure. You are a father of two teenage boys. Do your boys ever advise you on the contents of your books? They're both brilliant critics. They're very, very good. My oldest son Nicholas is great on some of the sort of sporting side of things. My younger son is also our Cassian has got a wonderful sense of humour and is great.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I was slightly misquoted on that. What I do believe is that the years thirteen and fourteen are a very wonderful and special time in your life. It's that very brief window between when you're not quite a child anymore, and are you quite an adult the in between years where anything really is possible you're finding yourself at thirteen and fourteen was when I was writing my first books and becoming a writer. So I very much like writing about that age range. Those first books that you were writing, what were you writing about? My early books Adventure Stories, I think one of them was about Guy Fawkes trying to blow up Parliament, something I still sometimes think about, blowing up Parliament, that is, and it was just before I got into sort of sort of sixteen and seventeen when I began to write about death the whole time, so I was still writing sort of fun stuff at that age. And you knew you were going to be a writer? I knew from the age of eight. I mean, I knew when I was as my first day at Orley Farm, you know, as soon as I was there and discovered the library and discovered”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my parents sent me to Sunday school as well to learn the Jewish religion which had the immediate effect of course of turning me into an atheist which I have been all my life ever since. But if I were going to turn to God on your island, I guess this piece of music might help convert me its out of the gloria by Viv”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know what's so weird is this if my kids every time they were going back to school began to scream and to cry and to go on sort of crash diet so they weren't going to be teased about being fat which they aren't, but if they were doing all that sort of stuff, I would know something was wrong and I would pull them out of the school pretty fast. Now I did all that, but my parents never thought about pulling me out of the place and just, you know, get on with it, go there. Now they weren't cruel people, I just think it was the time, you know, that, you know, if you had paid for that sort of education, the spirit was your kid just got on with it, your child had to put up with it. So it is surprising to me, though, that they didn't question it more, why I was so unhappy and so unsuccessful there.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, all the time, I mean, I made to stand up in front of all the school and told that I wasn't invited to Christmas this year,'cause I have such a bad boy. I don't think that's a good thing to do to a kid. I really don't, and you know, I went back to Orley Farm about five or six years ago and to visit. It's all modern now, it's all changed, of course, but they have kept the core exactly as it was as with the old crumbling lockers, the headmaster's study, the slightly uneven floor and the dining hall, and when I walked into that place I absolutely froze solid. Something happened to me. I'm not a very emotional person, but I found I was sweating, my heart was sort of palpitating, I could barely breathe, and it was at that moment as a visiting author at Orley Farm, but I realized just how much damage that place really had done to me.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I have some uncomfortable memories of the place. I am talking about teachers who were allowed to beat kids for a start, beat you until you bled, I mean growing up in this sort of environment that seemed to be designed entirely to turn you into a sort of a twisted individual. I mean, I was saved, I think, from all that, by books, by my writings.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because I was never really an action boy, I mean I knew from a very early age that I was not going to be an adventurer I had heroes like Shackleton, the explorer, longtime hero of mine, but I knew that that wasn't me. I was always going to be the boy sitting in the corner with the paper and the pen, so I never imagined myself as a spy. I imagined myself as somebody who might write about spies, which is what I then did.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I suppose he came for me in Fleming to start with, I have to admit it, are the influence both of the books which I read in my early teens and loved, and also the films which were a very big event and the early ones doctor No Goldfinger from Russia with Love were my happiest times at the cinema were spent watching them. So there is a little bit of bond in there, but at the same time he's a very modern boy, Alex, and he's a composite, really. There's a little bit of my own sons in him. There's a son of a friend of mine was a model for him. And he's many modern kids that I've met.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going into my teens, I think it's impossible for a man of my age not to have been influenced in some way by the Beatles are, I mean, I grew up with them all the time and they were always around, and so I've chosen an Rigby which is my favourite song.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relieved. My brother, my sister, and I famously danced on her grave. Literally. We literally did a small tango, not one of the pieces of music I have chosen you'll be glad to hear, but we just suddenly realised that we needed to put this ghost to rest, and so remembering the phrase dance on the grave, we decided to do just that. No, I think we did a little can actually was what it was.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The funny thing about her death is that she was stuck in an old people's home on her own. My mother had died, my father was dead, and the only person who went to visit her ever was me. I was suddenly stuck dutifully because I knew that my mother would want this, are going to see her once a week or once every two weeks and trying to chat her and trying to be nice to her, and this is an awful thing, but we had a terrible row one day. I finally lost it with her, and got very upset and said, you know, how much it hurt my mother and how awful she'd been. I just got it off my chest. I shouldn't have done it, because the next day she dropped dead. That was it. It was always as if the truth was just too much, and that was the end of it.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's difficult to give examples because they'll all sound petty and slight and small, but it was the demands of it. When my mother became terribly ill, just one example, and was dying of cancer, in terrible pain, my grandmother would ring her every week to shout at her, to boss her about why haven't you done my shopping? Who's going to help with my laundry? Why can't you sort out the broken light in my kitchen? And my mother was in bed dying. She was dying, but she would still drag us out of bed to go and service this spider at the heart of the web. Most evil in this world, you know, is not big evil, it's little, it's petty, and she was a prima facie example of that. I should say with the book I wrote about her granny, turns her into a joke, and I'm quite proud of the fact that in her death she's actually managed to make people laugh and smile which she certainly never did when she was living.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“peculiar sort of old fashionedness about the photos of my childhood, which don't seem to tell you with the fact that I'm not that old, really, I wasn't quite born in Victorian era. In nineteen ninety four you wrote a book called Granny Yes, that was based on my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was a completely horrible.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to nothing almost overnight. As an adult, then, do you wonder whether there was in fact any money left? We wonder if some of his colleagues took it. We wonder sometimes if it existed at all. My mother, after his death, did make a few trips to Switzerland to try and track it down, because, you know, all his business schemes had sort of turned into a nightmare. I just have vivid memories of those two weeks after he died living with her, and as these terrible letters came in, you know, dear Mrs. Horowitz was so sorry to hear about your husband PSU as a hundred thousand pounds, and whether he was a fantasist, whether he really was wealthy to this day, I just don't know. You mentioned before the first record that your childhood was taken away from you. Yes, I think that's true to a certain extent. I look at photographs of myself when I'm sort of seven and eight, and compare them with photographs of my children who are sort of rumping about and having fun, and I'm always sort of standing rather primly and stiffly. I was not the most attractive of children being rather sort of more round than I was tall, as I recall, but there is a sort of”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and if the conversation at the table wasn't good enough you were up to the nursery with the dread words you waited to hear and it was just this sort of extraordinary formality of it all are so out of place as I say among sort of middle class Jews in Stanmore. You see you're not quite sure what your father did, that seems extraordinary that you didn't actually know the job that your father occupied. He was a very mysterious man. I mean he was given to sort of ciphers and codes and secrets and you know I have a memory in my teens once of going across London on a motorbike carrying a hundred thousand pounds in bearer bonds to deliver to an office somewhere pretending to be from a security company. Now he never told me that by the way would be worth about half a million now, I guess, but he never told me where the money had come from, who it was going to, why I had to pretend to be a dispatcher I'd own all the rest of it. That was how he was, and of course when he died all the money disappeared. I put it in a Swiss bank somewhere and left a series of code books behind, but no ciphers. So we went from everyone.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chopin's study in C minor the Revolutionary Study played by Vladimir Horowitz No Relation, Anthony Horowitz, chosen there for the memory of your mother's piano teacher and his mastery of the keys. Your parents were very well off. Extremely yes. Tell us about life at home. It was very strange. I mean if I'd been living in sort of eighteenth century Versailles it would have been fine, but twentieth century North London it was a bit odd. My father I still to this day don't quite know what he did. He was a solicitor, I think, but he was involved in sort of a very mysterious circles. My mother was a sort of a socialite playing bridge and disappearing for tea parties and charity events. We lived in a huge house with servants and vast gardens and it was a sort of very arid existence. You're looking back on it now. It was sort of emotionally very empty. I'm very fond of my parents. You know, they were, I think, in their own way very good to me, but they were at the same time my father in particular very distant. So, you know, we're talking about a gong ringing at seven o'clock for dinner and servants service.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is a real accolade and are you treated better by well, let's say your publishers? I mean, is everybody sort of fit you in a way they didn't before? Well, publishers always treat their authors terribly, of course, and all they really want is more and more of the same but I don't think we're treated differently, but I think that children's books are treated better, which is great. Anthony, what's your first record? Well, going back to my childhood, this is a piece of Chopin. I've played Chopin very, very badly all my life, and one of the very happiest memories that I do have of my childhood is our listening to my mother, having lessons she was taught by a very good concert pianist called Bernard Vatebski, and at the end of a lesson as a special treat for me, he would sometimes play the revolutionary study, and I just remember thinking that it was impossible for a human being's fingers to move as fast as his, so that's my first choice.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“or a story only really exists when it's told to a lot of people, I mean if I tell you a story then it has a small flicker of life in it if I tell ten people then it's doing better but if I can tell that same story to a million people I think the story is up there and running. It was always my intention to write for as many people as possible because what I am doing after all is writing fairly simple stories. I am not doing anything that's very deep or serious or meaningful or even important. I mentioned that you knocked JK Ruling from the top of the best seller list this summer. At the same time you had six other novels in that top twenty children's bestseller list You've said that JK Rowling almost made it acceptable to be a children's author. What do you mean by that? Well before JK Rowling it was quite embarrassing to say that you were a children's author because the whole world was so different then. After the success and the money of JK Rowling are made, suddenly it became not just respectable to be a children's author but to become it was actually something that you could be quite proud of, almost like a sort of modern pop star. So the whole world has changed now and to be a children's authority.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“claimed an unhappy childhood, although every kid's writer does need one. What was unhappy for me was a school I was sent to Orley Farm where I was sent in nineteen sixty three which was very cold and very difficult for me, and it was at that time between ages eight to thirteen that I discovered books and the library and telling stories and discovered that I was only really going to be happy when I had a pen in my hand or a book in my hand and so it really was a great escape for me. Fascinating that you say that every writer needs one. Why does every writer need an unhappy, at least an unhappy part of their childhood? Well, I think that all writing does come out of tension to a certain extent and certainly for a children's author, I think that having missed out on some of the fun of childhood and feeling that childhood was taken away from me or lost to me to a certain extent helps me to try and recreate it in my books. What about the unashamedly populous nature of your writing? Was it always your intention to write for the masses? Well, I think that a book only”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in two thousand six. My castaway this week is one of Britain's foremost TV dramatists and children's writers, Anthony Horowitz. His prodigious output ranges from his numerous TV whodunits, including Poirot, midsummer murders and foils war, to a slew of novels, most notably the Alex Rider series about a fourteen year old secret agent. His approach is cheerfully populist, his last book knocked Harry Potter off the number one spot in the children's bestseller list, and he says his purpose is to entertain. But the breadth of his appeal masks how for him writing has always been an intensely private pursuit. After surviving a desperately unhappy childhood it was, he claims only through writing that he found him. What was it about writing that unlocked your sense of self, Antony? Well, my child wasn't entirely unhappy. I mean, I sometimes feel a bit embarrassed having been brought up by such wealthy parents and given such a good education.”
2006-12-31 · Desert Island Discs · Anthony Horowitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source