If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her say, 'I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one I love.' She is whispering that, and she whispers, 'By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

I've learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.

People can get involved in wonderfully creative ways that have nothing to do with you, but spark off things you begin with.

Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

I think radio plays are my favourite medium, as they make the listener work and create and contribute in a way that TV and film can never do, and they have an immediacy that written prose often lacks.

I don't know if proud is the right word, but I am somebody who does not, on the whole, have the highest regard for my own stuff in that when I look all I get to see are the flaws.