I always thought it hadn't influenced me very much, but I heard from many people from England that many motives from German fairytales are to be found in my books.

What's that sticky stuff called? Basta: Duct tape. Yes, duct tape. I love duct tape.

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

Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.

They wouldn't tell Scipio how much of the counterfeit cash was left since, as Riccio put it, 'You're a detective now, after all.

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.

I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.