Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.

Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.

I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.

Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.

The modern superstition is that we're free of superstition.

Fantasy gets a mixed reception - a lot of fantasy is formulaic but most of the award-winning fantasy on the contrary tends to be the stuff at the edges of the genre, rather than swimming in the middle.