It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors.

Dedication: My thanks to the people who showed me that opera was stranger than I could imagine. I can best repay their kindness by not mentioning their names here.

I know loads of coppers and dealt with them a lot when I was a journalist - coppers are easy to write for; they tend to run on rails.

My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

Some people are confident because they are fools. Leonard had the look of someone who was confident because, so far, he'd never found a reason not to be.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangeous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.