Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.

Flashback in film rarely works.

Yorkshire is so much part of me.

It was nine-thirty on Christmas Eve. As I crossed the long entrance hall of Monk’s Piece on my way from the dining room, where we had just enjoyed the first of the happy, festive meals, toward the drawing room and the fire around which my family were now assembled, I paused and then, as I often do in the course of an evening, went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside.

I would act, pretend, and the pretense would become real.

They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.

Memory is like a long, dark street, illuminated at intervals in a light so bright that it shows up every detail. And then one plunges into the dark stretch again.

There are some temptations that cannot be resisted, some lessons we never learn.

Sometimes a book has its day and, although of course it does not change, the reader does, as a result of having read better things, or new tastes having come to the fore, or fashions in literature having moved on. Other novels seem to have improved, usually because we have matured as readers, our imaginations have expanded and we understand new literary approaches, sometimes because of life events which have opened us up to a new emotional awareness and understanding.

Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.