With pornography, if you don't get hard or wet, depending on your gender, it didn't work. With humour, if you don't laugh it didn't work. And with horror, if you don't get scared or haunted, depending on what it's trying to do, it didn't work. I'm fascinated by those three categories.

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.

According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea.

I never fell. I don't care what they say. I'm still doing my job, as I see it.

Richard wondered how the marquis managed to make being pushed around in a wheelchair look like a romantic and swashbuckling thing to do.

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort.