Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

In England, everyone believes if you think, then you don't feel. But all my novels are about joining together thinking and feeling.

History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.

I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I'm ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.