“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people. ”

“That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.”

“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.”

“When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.”

“I had decided I would put off the novel until I had gone to Europe and had a lover.”

“I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me - I would go so far as to say that it's my favourite leisure activity,”