The battle of good and evil reduced to a fat woman standing in front of a chocolate shop, saying, Will I? Won’t I? in pitiful indecision.
Change isn’t always comfortable, but it is a fact of life.
One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.
I’m not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.
If you want to know what’s important to a culture, learn their language.
I love it when my books cause controversy, when people argue violently about the ending.
I think everybody has a secret life.
I think if you are an outsider then you are an outsider always.
I’m incapable of hiding my feelings when I’m around someone I don’t like.
I’m insatiably curious.
I’m politically inclined towards the left, but I don’t like to be in anyone’s gang; I’m a bit of a loose cannon.
If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It’s the ethic my mother brought me up with.
Online communities are an expression of loneliness.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a mentor. The closest thing is my friend Christopher Fowler, another writer. Chris kept me sane for a long time before I made it.
I have a tendency to pick up my own challenges. The more difficult something it is, the more I want to try it.
I dream a lot, in colour and in sound and scent. Quite a few of my stories have come from dreams.
As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.
Before you have children, you mostly think about the world in terms of yourself. And when you become a parent, the focus shifts to somebody else.
From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job – very good advice.
I am fascinated by how people eat and what it reveals about them.