What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right? Wouldn't that be wonderful?

If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.

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.

Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.

The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

The past is what you take with you.