So it's happened, I kept thinking, you're in the middle of a story exactly as you've always wanted, and it's horrible. Fear tastes quite different when you're not just reading about it, Meggie, and playing hero wasn't half as much fun as I'd expected.

It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place

The night belongs to beasts of prey, and always has. It's easy to forget that when you're indoors, protected by light and solid walls.

Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

I have two Iceland horses, a very hairy dog called Looney, and a guinea pig.

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?