My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.