..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.

... He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.