If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sout with the same tongue.

Fictions are merely frozen dreams, linked images with some semblance of structure. They are not to be trusted, no more than the people who create them.

Doctor Who has never pretended to be hard science fiction... At best Doctor Who is a fairytale, with fairytale logic about this wonderful man in this big blue box who at the beginning of every story lands somewhere where there is a problem...

You have to finish things - that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

Nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience.

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.