I had a fear of becoming anything, a fear of becoming a specialist. I might have become a doctor, but if you become a doctor, that's your specialty in life and you are defined by it. One of the attractions of being a writer is that you're never a specialist. Your field is entirely open; your field is the entire human condition.

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

I think the purveyors of e-books are only too happy for this atmosphere of 'everything belongs to everybody' to increase because it means they don't have to think so much about the original maker of the thing, or they can get away with paying them less.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

I share my name with an aerobatic bird that can whiz across a whole summer sky in seconds. A swift is so equipped for speed that it can scarcely cope with being stationary.

Pillow talk. It's how you know, it's how you tell, that something different, something special is happening: that this might even be the most important night of your life. Some day -some night- I hope you both may know it, with whoever it may be: the wish, stealing up on you, not to just merge bodies, but all you have, all your years, all your memories up to that point. And why should you wish to do that, if you haven't already guessed that your future too, will be shared?