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.

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

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

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

In the end that was the choice you made, and it doesn't matter how hard it was to make it. It matters that you did.

The outside world can be very tough.

I'm still vulnerable and still weak.

We only get together when there's a good reason. Like, last summer, we didn't really intend to go out, but we thought the B-52's tour was a good opportunity.

Before you can make good music, you just have to shut up. Then the music can say what it has to say.

To be making something as yet unformed, unknown - to be living in a deferred moment - is the most seductive way to exist.

Everyone can tell you the risk. An entrepreneur can see the reward.

Misery is not given by anyone or anything in life. It is your own mind which makes you miserable or happy and uplifted.

My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.