A spider brings good luck before midnight and bad luck after.

You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.

Children are knives, my mother once said. They don’t mean to, but they cut. And yet we cling to them, don’t we, we clasp them until the blood flows.

I'm not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.

I like autumn. The drama of it; the golden lion roaring through the back door of the year, shaking its mane of leaves. A dangerous time; of violent rages and deceptive calm, of fireworks in the pockets and conkers in the fist.

It's a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.

I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.