“What shall I do, today? Visit the pub?Sit down in a garden with a book? A birdflies past. Where is it headed? It's out ofsight already. The drunkenness of a bird in theburning azure. The melancholy of a manin the cool shadow of a mosque.”

“I never knew what an extraordinary thing it could be to write a book. In the first place, the characters take the bit between their jaws and canter off with you into places you don't want and never catered for. I had smugly intended my book to be about a family rather like ours, but, lud love you! it's already turned into an account of a barmaid's career in an Edgware Road pub, and I can't squeeze us in anywhere!Odd things happen, too. I had called my pub, 'The Three Feathers,' and counted on there being heaps of pubs in Edgware Road, not called that, but looking a bit like my description. Before we left home, I went down Edgware Road to investigate, and found my pub, even down to the old-fashioned phonograph on the table in the upstairs sitting-room. And I thought, 'I built that place.”

“What I'm saying, my little wall flower, is desire becomes your enemy when your mate is being a butt head. And Decebel is in mega, super-sized butt head mode. Do ya feel me? You see where I'm going with this or do I have to sit you down and have the birds and the bees conversation?”

“So when you do get on, the first class people are already sitting there; they're all sprawled out on their big thrones. "Bring me the head of a pig! And a goblet of something cool and refreshing! Anyone have a fiddle? Amuse me.”

“I could sit in a pub and tell you all the things that are written in this book, but you wouldn't fucking listen.”

“I love anything old. I love to travel and especially like to visit the places where my books are set. My husband and I often stay in out-of-the-way inns and houses built in times past. It's fun and it gives a wonderful sense of a by-gone era.”