“If you’re passionate and emotional, they make you passionate and emotional about your worse fears.”

I don’t write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

The plain unwelcome fact is that sometimes life stymies you.

And when someone else speaks your name you feel pleased. You feel wanted. You feel there. Alive.

How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as ‘facts.’ Yes, I know that in this case one ‘fact’ was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a ‘fact,’ and act on it as if it were true.

The demons of the Devil don’t use your weak weaknesses against you, they use your strong ones.

I cannot live without reading.

However much you love somebody, you should always keep a part of yourself to yourself.

Miss the moment and you never get a chance again.

Rooms are a fixed size, which can’t be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones.

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.

If a boy, if a man, asks you if you’re all right and you say yes, he’ll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It’s just the way they’re made.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is.

Like just now. Like now. How is it possible? Can you love someone more and more and at the same time, all the time, love them as much as it’s possible to love someone?

There are times when you want to be what you have never allowed yourself to be before.

They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who’s in them.