Growth purely for its own sake is the philosophy of cancer.

The safest course was actually the simplest-do nothing at all and hope everything turned out for the best. It wasn't a great plan, but it had the benefits of simplicity and a long tradition.

I still feel threatened by academics, but my books have a lot of academic in-jokes and everybody assumes I went to university and studied English.

The best plans are always the simplest.

I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.

True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good - and we all know how rare that is.

There is a certain degree of steampunkishness that creeps into my books.