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

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.

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.

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

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.

So much money and energy is expended making a film that I think it should be used for positive ends.

Be yourself. Play within yourself. Play your own game.

You could take the Internet enthusiasm that was happening in 1999 and 2000 here in the U.S., and in China it was three-to-five times more ebullient.

If you cast wrong, you are in a lot of trouble.

Great triumphs can only come out of great trials

People are supposed to be loyal to the country above [Donald's Trump] family.

Democrats don't sound united.

With age comes wisdom and confidence, and I don't feel like I'm seeking approval as much as I used to from other people.

I think there are more people waiting to forgive me than I need to forgive them.