“Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all, story work in harmony and true proportion, is fucking *hard*." --Nicola Griffith,www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030929...”

“The lives and deaths of characters in stories and poems, however tragic, help us to learn about the world and - if we are brave enough - to change it.”

“I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.”

“They reckon you feel love in your heart but that's bollocks. True love, the type what strikes you down and makes you change for ever, you feel that kind of love in every fucking organ inside you.”

“You may not be aware, ma douce, but not all vampyre have a kindred, some will live out their existence without such beauty in their lives. I have waited five hundred years for you.”

“Well, do a good day's work and act like somebody.”

“The trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has been set. No amount of bleating or praying or wailing of cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back.”