The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.

I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.

My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.

I'm more a dog person than a cat person.

I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.

I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.

I've never been baptised.

[My muse] is, in fact, a woman of the world, and precisely because of this, hopes that a diversity of cultures will endure, and that one bland monoculture does not swamp everything.

If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.

If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.

Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Great Love goes with great forgiveness

The degree of loving is measured by the degree of giving.

Teach them what you love to do in life. It really doesn't matter what it is. It never does. Just show them how important a passion is . . .

Whatever a human being makes and makes live, it lives because of the life he puts into it.

Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

The single biggest reason I got my stories taken in various literary magazines - and I want to stress this - is because I refused to give up. Period.

Paper money is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.

There is a certain amount of dissatisfaction that goes with knowing your time, talent and abilities are not being properly used.