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.

Library-denigrators, pay heed:suggesting that the Internet is a viable substitute for libraries is like saying porn could replace your wife.

Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.

I don't think I've ever had a mentor. The closest thing is my friend Christopher Fowler, another writer. Chris kept me sane for a long time before I made it.

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 have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.

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