No point in thinking, you just have to get on with life. We only have one after all, we should try and do our best. We can never get it right, but we must try.

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

Julia's vocabulary was "chock-full" of strangely archaic words - "spiffing," "crumbs," "jeepers" - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness, a conundrum that she couldn’t even begin to solve.