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" All my novels are about people who strive to heal and evolve. "

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" The privileged Victorians who did most to improve the lives of the poor were not ashamed of their pious intent: they were superiors seeking to help inferiors. "

" I am open-eyed about what poverty does to people. "

" I had been attempting novels since I was 14 but always ran out of steam. High hopes, poor craftsmanship. "

" Most books are surplus to the world's requirements, and I am going to sound very conceited here, but I am trying to write books that aren't just using up trees. "

" In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens. "

" I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever. "

" Before I was published, I thought men read car manuals or books about football. But once I started having really serious conversations with male lovers of literature, I let go of that prejudice. "

" I wanted each of my books to be very different from the others, each to be special and uncategorizable, and I knew I could only do that a few times before I was in danger of repeating myself. "

" The mere fact of my novel being filmed means very little to me. For a long while after 'The Crimson Petal's publication in 2002, it looked as though Hollywood was going to adapt it. "

" The family I grew up in was very inflexible and harsh. It left me with the feeling that if you do let somebody down badly, then even if they tell you it's all right, it cannot be all right. "

" My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I'm in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to. "

" When the person you love has cancer, they are, in a sense, living on Planet Cancer. They are in a place where you are not. And you can't follow them. "

" Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was. "

" I think there is that very basic yearning for something or someone to be looking after us, for there to be a framework holding the universe together that is benign and intelligent. We're not going to get rid of that; it's just too scary to be that molecule flying around briefly in a vacuum. "

" If someone's a cartoon villain, you can dismiss them, but if they behave despicably but you kind of like them, they really get under your skin. "

" Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required. "

" I tend to process emotional stuff very, very slowly. "

" One of the things that struck me about the 1870s, which we still haven't nearly addressed, is what to do about the male-female divide. One of the forbidden topics is when men own up to the omnivorousness of their sexual interest and how to square that with being in love with an individual woman. "

" I'm a loner and always have been. "

" I don't remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks. "

" In all of my work, I think I'm exploring the idea that we are aliens to each other, how there is a huge distance that separates us all. "

" At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens. "

" I never, ever want to be in a position where people are sitting round a table, saying, 'We've got this book. I don't really get it, but we paid for it, so we've got to sell it.' I'm not Tony Parsons; that's not right for me. "

" I get increasingly respectful of people who have faith and increasingly creeped out by them. "

" By recycling pre-existing material, Shakespeare seemed to endorse a view common in his time, which has become even more entrenched in the 400 years since: that all the truly essential stories are already in the bag. "

" On an average day, I spend 12 hours listening to music. Very little writing. "

" I joined an Internet community of Victorian scholars, which meant that if I posted a question about 1875's lavender harvest, more than a thousand experts would ponder it. "

" I think I have written the things I was put on Earth to write. "

" When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work. "

" Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable. "