The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.

Great control and great discipline are necessary when you reach your own editing stage of the book, but in the early stages you have to be prepared to let anything happen and to get it wrong or go off track. The development of a character is not smooth or simple - it is as tricky as meeting someone new whom you would like to know better.

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

Why did I walk so purposefully in a straight line? Where would it take me? He went round and round and we got there all the same.

He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

Meatspace still has some advantages for a carbon-based girl.

We [fiction writers] are much more of a maze than we are a motorway. Things are always in flux, they're always in movement, they're always twisting back on each other. I think the straight line is such a lie.