Oh, God. What was happening to her, she was turning into a normal person.
I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.
Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all – a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.
If you don’t have a unique voice, then you’re not really a writer.
I’ve always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn’t know, and with ‘Case Histories’ I just decide to make that more up-front.
I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.
If people believed in eternal damnation they might not be seizing the day quite so much.
I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn’t, so I think it is possibly the end.
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.
The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.
As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.
When I’m writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can’t read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.
It’s been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.
Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I’m totally insane.
Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.
My father was an autodidact. It wasn’t a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education – he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn’t allowed to go.
I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’ and to my surprise she auctioned them off.
I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere – 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.
I don’t have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I’m big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.