Sometimes we can choose the paths we follow. Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.

I have no plans to love you," said Coraline. "No matter what. You can't make me love you.

Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here.

There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in cliches and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams. He would be sitting in a chair outside a little cafe on the other side of Aldwych, sipping a frothy coffee and occasionally cheering at an exceptionally well-flung bucket of napalm.

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

Some things are too big to be seen; some emotions are too huge to be felt.

I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.