“So from the first novel I’ve been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don’t try to protect them in ways that aren’t good for the story.”

I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I’m reviewing a book or doing research.

Well. I don’t suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can’t.

I’ve found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person.

How quickly a person in pain whom you can’t help becomes a reproach. And then, no doubt, a thorn.

If you’re going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won’t be interesting to the reader.

Faith is like radar that sees through the fog — the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.

The importance of a journey is not measured by the distance covered, but by the destination reached.

These ‘messengers’ will not be hindered from accomplishing at their best speed the distance which they have to go, either by snow, or rain, or heat, or by the darkness of night.

Once we decide we have to do something, we can go miles ahead.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

What pains me is that we are having a long distance relationship without a long distance.