My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate.

Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.