Author

I think everybody has a secret life.

The interesting thing about the Internet is that it has created a kind of alternative circle of friends for people.

If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there's a knock at the door, then you've done something pretty terrific as a writer.

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.

Some areas of technology really don't interest me at all, but I welcome anything that makes life easier instead of harder.

I think everybody has a secret life.

Some areas of technology really don't interest me at all, but I welcome anything that makes life easier instead of harder.

If you want something you can have it, but you have to do some work. It's the ethic my mother brought me up with.

I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

I don't think I've ever had a mentor. The closest thing is my friend Christopher Fowler, another writer. Chris kept me sane for a long time before I made it.

As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.

From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job - very good advice.

If you want to know what's important to a culture, learn their language.

I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.

I was a very bad accountant; I didn't care about money, golf or discovering fraud. After about a year I was sacked; then I went into teacher training.

I have a tendency to pick up my own challenges. The more difficult something it is, the more I want to try it.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

I'm not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.

I had a great grandmother who believed in so many strange superstitions. She used to tell the future from the things that catch on to the hem of your skirt when you've been sewing, and different colored threads would mean different things... Of course, all that influenced me quite a lot as a child.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.