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'Great Expectations' is one of the greatest stories.

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

I'm totally obsessed with Dickens, and 'Great Expectations' was one of the first book's I read when I was still in school in Porthcawl.

I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.

One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.

I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.

My favorite novels allow me to imagine the characters afterward and what happened, and that I've witnessed a really great story, where the world goes on.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.