It's quiet. No cars. No birds. Nothing.' 'No radio waves,' said the Doctor. 'Not even Radio Four.' 'You can hear radio waves?' 'Of course not. Nobody can hear radio waves,' he said unconvincingly.

I see libraries and librarians as frontline soldiers in the war against illiteracy and the lack of imagination.

It always felt like the price of being a writer was that you would - even in the most terrible moments, there was a little phantom version of you sitting on your shoulder with a notebook going, I can use this. OK, look at the way that the light is glinting off the broken plastic on the road next to the blood. You can use this. And it was always a very strange feeling.

And so there is magic.

I very rarely want to go back and fix things, because I'm much more interested in the next thing, and in taking what I learned from the things that don't work, and applying them to new things that may work.

Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?

It's easier to believe in aliens than in gods.