Fascinatingly confident, rude people are great.

Madame Kovarian: The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules. The Doctor: Good men don't need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.

When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.

Kathy Nightingale: What's good about sad? Sally Sparrow: It's happy for deep people.

I always rip out the last page of a book. Then it doesn't have to end. I hate endings!

It's a funny thing about stories. It doesn't feel like you make them up, more like you find them. You type and type and you know you haven't got it yet, because somewhere out there, there's that perfect thing -- the unexpected ending that was always going to happen. That place you've always been heading for, but never expected to go.

My problem is that the audience is more fiction-literate than ever. In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life; today you experience four or five different kinds of fiction every day. So staying ahead of the audience is impossible.