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 find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.

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'.

You're so calm and quiet, you never say. But there are things inside you. I see them sometimes, hiding in your eyes.

The sign of a masterpiece: A painting when there's a lack of resolution.

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.

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.