Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

Writers are liars my dear, surely you know that by now?

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.

A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now that's a question.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.