The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

This isn't the first time the world has come to an end, and it won't be the last either.

The great thing about books is that you can end with a question mark.

My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.