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I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.

I don't understand it when people get cross about how one of their works was adapted and say, 'Oh, they ruined it!' Well, the book is still there.

The books are all very, very different so the publishers really had to be different too.

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written.

I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.

I can't write the same book over and over again... let it go, once it's gone!

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.