“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.

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.

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.

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.

I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.

…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

I read very little contemporary anything.

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read Boneland.

To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.