Popularity: 0
Vote:   | America does influence my work, also France, Europe generally, the East and India. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | An editor suggested to me I might try contemporary horror. At first this didn't appeal - then the idea arrived. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Archetypes are universal, and, in subtle or extravagant ways, interchangeable. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | But all lives are important, all people are important, because everyone is a book. Some people just have easier access to it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | How dare one presume to write in a particular way, for children? They deserve the best of a writer, just as the writer deserves the best of themselves. The only limits are sex, for reasons of censorship, and violence, for reasons of common sense. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I am by no means unique. Let us respectfully allow children and the young to make their own decisions. |
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Vote: | I am interested in most mythology. Celtic or Christian no more than anything else. |
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Vote: | I came up with a parallel Venice called Venus. set in a parallel Venice about 1701. |
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Vote: | I couldn't believe someone had produced literature that was like an entirely new language, beautiful stuff. Graham Greene, everything. William Golding. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I do need space aside from projects that fit in with what I am known for... to work on more contemporary novels. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I don't have specific aims. Only to keep writing. I need more time, as I said, perhaps 25 hours in a day would be helpful. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I don't write backwards, I've never been able to do that! |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have been approached several times by the movie industry, who have sometimes taken out options on my work. So far nothing has come of any of this. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have just finished a parallel Victorian novel... about a duel between the powers of Bast and Anubis, or between man and woman-or between hate and love, pain and comfort, power and kindness. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I have to write longhand, and no one can read my writing, I have to type my own manuscripts, because I'm going almost in a zigzag, across and then down. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I haven't deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can't get anything into print. And apparently I'm not alone in this. There are people of very high standing, authors who are having problems. So I have been told. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I just love doing everything. |
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Vote: | I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I like time to struggle with my characters and plotlines... but then, when you want to do something, you seize it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I love all types of music, but classical music particularly has had an enormous influence on my writing, and some pieces have directly inspired a book. Shostakovich's Symphony Number 5 was a direct influence. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does? |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I rather like turning all stories around. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I realised that what pirates do is so ghastly I simply didn't want to get into it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I started a version of my French historical novel... I found it utterly fascinating. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I used to throw away my holograph manuscripts after I'd typed them, but I'm keeping a lot of them now, because obviously, at 50, I'm starting to think, if anyone ever is interested in me after I'm dead, they can look and see. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I used to work all hours of day and night, but changes in my life and physical stamina have meant that now I rarely work so long as I did-4 in the morning was a reasonable time to me, for finishing up. That isn't in my range any more. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was born in North London in 1947. I didn't learn to read until I was almost 8-partly bad schooling, and partly I suspect slight dyslexic problems. My father, driven mad by this, taught me to read. At 9 I began writing. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didn't always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was very influenced when I was young by the epics like Ben Hur, Spartacus, and most of Cecil B De Mille's films. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was very interested by the eastern idea of death as a woman... the type of eastern literature where death was personified as a woman; women were considered dangerous and untamed and pariah material, and that was why death was in female form. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I will admit to a pleasure and sense of hope in what I see as the basic teachings of Christ, stripped of the nonsense that has sometimes been accumulated about them and the embarrassing misunderstanding. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I work when I can and feel able to, but that is still most days. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe! |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm a devotee of Dracula, which was a pathfinder in horror and vampire fiction. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it! |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I've also done contemporary novels, a detective novel, which is coming out soon, and lesbian fiction. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I've also written a big fantasy, very much the sort of thing I used to write, set in kind of a Greek world, though with a lot of differences. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I've got a couple of science fiction ideas that I want to do, both quite harsh - and possibly quite funny. And not like anything I've done so far. But I'm never entirely sure what I'm going to do. It's always a surprise to me. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I've written two books set in India... In the mid-'80s, I just fell for India, and it was like a love affair. I was obsessed with it. I read a few things, and looked at films, and it was as though I was more there than in England, where I was writing! This always happens to me, and it's magical. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If anyone ever wonders why there's nothing coming from me, it's not my fault. I'm doing the work. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If I can't see something enough, I shut my eyes and look at it, and I there. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In art, I appreciate Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites, Cezanne, early Picasso... I'm afraid he lost me a little bit with his later images, which look like the onset of a migraine attack when everything splits into bits, which is probably why they scare me. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In my 20s some of my work for children was published by Macmillan. However, I was 27 before my adult novel... was taken by DAW Books in the USA. This enabled me finally to stop doing stupid and soul-killing jobs, and start working day and night as a professional writer. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | In whatever form, or by whatever means, everyone has the right to develop or transform-providing this hurts no one else in any life-threatening way. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Later influences include Rebecca West, Rosamond Lehmann and Elizabeth Bowen, but there are so many others. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Locality is, in my case, unimportant. My mind and heart go where they wish. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My interest in reincarnation... I explored in a number of works. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | My parents were dancers, and we traveled around a lot, so I went to some very ropy schools where I learned a lot about being bullied and not a great deal about anything else. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | No one is ever ordinary. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Once I could read, I think writing followed very quickly; I was able to put down my words and letters... So there's just over a year between my learning to read and beginning to write. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | People are always the start for me... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead... these are all people to me. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Pirates have always fascinated me. |
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Vote: | Rachmaninov had an endless influence on me. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The contrast between the ancient and the modern is what I enjoy most about these books. I don't know why, and have no intellectual reason I can give. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The one area that always enthuses me is the one I'm writing at that particular moment-but of course you do get an influx of other things you want to do, usually in the middle of an enormous novel. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis. |
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Vote: | There are the characters who die but who you follow after death, and they often lead much more interesting lives after they are dead! So the characters usually drive me along, but occasionally the plot has to come first. It can get sticky. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Usually the characters lead, but sometimes you have such a strong theme that... they won't let you. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We are all people, and all have different ages. No difference at all, except the censoring-I don't like to put too much horror in for younger children, and obviously sex has to be contained in a sensible way. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We used to go to the cinema once or twice a week, and they used to preview X-certificate films-those which children couldn't see-and I was terrified, and used to have nightmares just from the previews. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | What I like about vampires is what I like about everything I want to write about, the depths and heights, the pain and joy. Life. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | When I am fascinated by something, I like to play with it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | When I started as a writer, I knew nothing about publishing-nothing about anything! |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure? |