Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic.

What’s the opposite of déjà vu, when you see something that hasn’t happened yet?” “I don’t know—avant verrais?

It took me ten years and seven books to bag an agent - it took me that long to start writing good.

You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.

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.

Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.

Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.