“I think the most helpful piece of advice I can give is probably not to use your delete button until you have a first draft. I always tell people ‘don’t change anything’.”

“Writers are complete vultures […], we feed off other people’s scripts”

“As a writer of novels, [...] you can create whole worlds and the budget’s still the same.”

“If Richard Curtis can write a terrible film and go ‘Let’s just set it at Christmas, it’ll make a million bucks’, then I think I’m well within my rights to follow suit with the book”

“As a teenager, she [Isabella Blow] was famous for taking off her clothes, not putting them on.”

“Obviously I get writer’s block sometimes, but because I had just an hour, I’d go in and I’d just type fast.”

“People know I like ghosts, but they don’t appreciate that that’s not horror. And I don’t do horror.”

“Initially, there were good intentions to prevent food spoilage. […] So something like processed cheese was a miracle!”

“I was raised on patriarchy, so it would be dishonest not to allude to it in my books.”