Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

I'd rather be a freak than a clone.

The dead know everything but they don't give a damn.

I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.

I don't listen to music when I'm writing, but I often do when I'm reworking, editing or when I need to relax.

Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.