If all my friends jumped off a bridge, I wouldn't jump with them. I'd be at the bottom, hoping to catch them.

If what you know and what you love are the same thing, that's great. But if not, write what you love. I love history, secrets, conspiracies, action, adventure, international settings.

History serves as a model not only of who and what we are to be, we learn what to champion and what to avoid.

I don't think my mum ever understood my love of Doctor Who. Surely her strongest memory would have been me, standing at the top of the stairs, crying about how the "jelly men" were going to get me? Sorry, Mum, for those sleepless nights, but it was with good reason they called it Terror of the Zygons.

Say it, do it, preach it, shout it, but never, absolutely never, believe your own bullshit.

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

Follow your heart. It rarely leads you astray. It's thinking that gets us into trouble.