She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honour, for love.

Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be.

I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?

Don't write outlines; I hate outlines.

One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.

But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

The sea is never weary. I must be as tireless.