Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

We think of mortality so little these days... I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones. Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I: As I am so will you be.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

When we can't see a pattern, we fit pieces together until one takes shape, because we have to.