We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.

I have consistently loved books that I've read when I've been sick in bed.

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London.

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

That's how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.

I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,’ she said. ‘And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it's gone. I don't know which is worse — to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.’ Falling Angels