I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more.

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.