I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.

None of us know where our stories come from. That's why writers make fun of people who ask us where we get our ideas... because we don't know.

What power would Hell have if those imprisoned were not able to dream of Heaven?

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

As a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.

Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea.