There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

I think we are worlds compressed into human form.

The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

Infatuation.First Love.Lust.My passion can be explained away.But this is sure: Whatever she touches, she reveals

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.