If only Sam could have stayed just like the Dog, she thought. A comforting friend without the complication of romantic interest.There had to be something she could do to completely discourage him, short of throwing up, or making herself totally unattractive. "I'm thirty-five," she said at last.

Since being a prisoner was a definite improvement over being dead, which was what she thought was going to happen when the Loundergs had attacked, Suzy was quite cheerful.

Fish and fowl, warm sun and shady trees, the field mice in the wheat, under the cool light of the moon.

As for you, Private, if you mention a word of this to anyone, I'll feed you to the cat thing here. Understand?" "Yum," said Mogget. "Yes, sir!" mumbled the telephone operator, his hands shaking as he tried to smother the burning wreckage of his switchboard with a fire blanket.

I think I've actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I'm familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.

Clearly the Old One had the capacity to kill - or easily deliver some sort of final ending that sounded remarkably like death.

I think there is a kind of laconic Australian leg-pulling sense of humor that is certainly in some of my stories, or is an element in some of my books, and that's probably a direct result of where I've grown up. But other than that I don't draw particularly on the Australian landscape or the Australian biology and so on. So I don't think there's anything you could point to and say is particularly Australian.