The reality of the writer's world is that you set yourself up for future disappointment with every success that you deliver because you end up raising your audience's expectations.

I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

What I would not like is to be ignored. I write from the heart. I don't write for me. I write for my readers.

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

We don't need to dumb down our stuff. And it's important to know how far we can push readers.

When working on a period, it is the finer details that evoke imagery that helps in cinematic adaptations.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, You cant know where youre going if you dont know where youve been. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.