Unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realization that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.