“Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.”

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”

“Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren't enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.”

“I always had to buy a book, even if I wasn't done with the one I was currently reading. I loved to read. I felt like the trun of each page echoed between the covers of the world inside them-and each book had its own rules. There, within the mystique of that connection, was something special, and I was an addict.”

“I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.”

“If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.”