I've experienced huge kindness here, a great welcome and some very generous reviews without the snide social edge I often suffer from at home. I'm not patronized here either, which I much appreciate!

The world's tragedy is that men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters.

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference. I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.

You can change yourself and you can change the situation but you absolutely cannot change other people. Only they can do that.

I always love writing about children.

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

You can't love a library of e-books. You can't furnish a room with e-books.

You can't help parts of yourself leaking into other characters.

I'm no lyrical stylist, you wouldn't pick me for a perfect sentence, and I certainly wouldn't describe my novels as intellectual.

I am not a fan of the cupcake image. This idea that you can distract a girl with something frivolous like a cake or shoes or handbags, and she won't be a threat to men.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

Please bury me in the library With a dozen long-stemmed proses

Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.

If you want to know the value of a day, ask someone who could not find food to eat or water to drink for a whole day when he is hungry.

Sometimes street knowledge can be as important as book knowledge.

I have found that I have no unusual endowments of intellect, but this day I resolve that I will be an uncommon Christian.

Are you loving having these great iconic stories back as much as I am? 'One Life' is back in action and I love putting my 'Blair on' again.

I knew unless I got stopped I was going to go all the way. I don't know if I can run any faster. I just ran as fast as I could.

To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say.

An industrious sinner I much prefer to a lazy saint.