I think my body knew before my mind did. Or maybe I just refused to listen to what I knew.

A kingdom needs tending, just like a cheese. Leave a cheese too long and the whey settles to the bottom and sours the whole. Leave a kingdom for too long and others rise to the top and take the whole.

Lady Dance’s music wasn’t a magic charm. I’d misunderstood. We had all failed to understand. The song and dance didn’t stop us dying. It just stopped the fear of death swallowing us up while we were still alive. ‘Rejoice,’ came the soft voice of Lady Dance in my mind. ‘Watch the moon and stars... ’ Death had ruled my life till I met Lady Dance. Her dance had set me free.

I knew this was a jewel of a day that would glow bright for my whole life, brighter than any ruby in Macbeth’s crown.

I do read very, very quickly. I do process data very quickly. And so I write very quickly. And it is embarrassing because there is a conception that the things that you do quickly are not done well. I think that’s probably one of the reasons I don’t like the idea of prolific.

Books aren’t like broccoli. You don’t have to eat it because it’s good for you. Books drag you in because they are fascinating.

Mobile phones would have wrecked the plots of most of Shakespeare’s plays.

One of my extraordinary regrets about my death is not so much that it’s going to happen but simply that I’ll never know what happens next.

I think I have probably adjusted the way I see the world, I interpret the world and I communicate the world into book format simply because of this familiarity. Possibly in another society and another context I might have been a storyteller or who knows what.

Very much in my books people find not surrogate families because they are real families. We’ve got families that we’re related to by blood but we’ve also got families that we acquire. And those too I think are pretty much part of my books.