The key word for my book The Woman in Black is unsettling... because you're not terrified all of the time or even frightened, but you're unsettled and once you're unsettled, then the door's open.

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.

Ghost stories ... tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us.

I had not yet learned that we make our own destiny, it springs from within us. It is not the outward events but what we allow ourselves to make of them that count.

I'm really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out.

Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life.

I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre.

A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.

I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder.

I had changed, and gone on changing, but I did not fully remember how it had begun, or understand why.

What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?

Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.

None of us are really that big of a deal in the world - but you are your dog's everything.

Love is worth whatever it costs.

Do not take the agenda that someone else has mapped out for your life.

Never take advice from anyone in a tie. They'll bankrupt you. Don't ask a general for advice on war, and don't ask a broker for advice on money.

The devils never had a Savior offered to them, but you have; and do you yet make light of Him?

Anything you can do, I can do meta

There is a tremendous rise now in feminine awareness and wishing for equality, equal opportunities.