Any closer would unravel her mystery, the very thing which made her so truly beautiful...It was her mystery that he adored. He was in love with everything that he did not know about her... No real sexual encounter could ever match the secret one that he could nurture in his imagination... No living flesh could ever be the erotic equal of flesh kept private, untouchable and unknowable

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.

Kingsley watched her disappear from the room, wondering if his heart would break. Logic informed him that of course it would not. The heart was no more than a muscle, a pump which distributed blood about the body.

The Germans are a cruel race. Their operas last for six hours and they have no word for fluffy.

I'm lucky because the strongest emotion I have ever felt is being in love, and that definitely informs my writing.