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" I was a terrible painter - my portraits looked like the evil chimera love-children of Picasso's demoiselles and the BBC test card clown. "

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" Swimming in the cold and the dark of British autumn is not for the faint-hearted. "

" Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers. "

" You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance. "

" Wonderful characters rotate around and through bookshops on a daily basis, competing with and possibly even triumphing over fiction when it comes to entertainment, strangeness and inspiration. "

" Show, don't tell, is a mantra repeated by tutors of creative writing courses the world over. As advice for amateurs, it is sound and helps avoid character profiling, unactivated scenes, and broken narrative frames. "

" I can gabble on now, but I couldn't when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time in my own head on the moors by myself. It felt like writing was the right way to express myself. "

" Various books revolutionised what I think about novels and showed me that they're not strict, formulaic things. 'Coming Through Slaughter' by Michael Ondaatje was one of them. "

" I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power. "

" My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant. "

" Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form. "

" I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks? "

" Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland. "

" Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power. "

" One of the things I try to do with my writing is try to evoke the spirit of the place. I think these things imprint on the landscape and the culture. "

" Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped. "

" I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women. "

" I used to dislike bookshops immensely as a child and was won over only later in life. "

" The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared. "

" I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist. "

" Revisiting much-loved childhood novels is never easy. "

" When I moved back to Cumbria, one of the first things I did was locate a decent bookshop. "

" I've always been interested in wolves, since I was a child. There was a wolf enclosure in a wildlife park very close to where I was brought up; they were the main attraction. "

" I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground. "

" I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s. "

" When you are a kid, a wolf is an amazing sight, so sumptuous. I sort of knew these were splendid creatures, that I was not going to find them outside roaming around. It was like a dog, but not a dog. It was incredible, a god! "

" Our lives are politically wound. "

" My favourite pool is located in a remote valley in the eastern Lake District, surrounded by vine-hung cliffs and slippery boulders. It has a torrential sheet waterfall at one end and is almost black in colour, so it appears bottomless, a portal to nowhere. "

" Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city. "

" You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone. "

" Writing, and its theatre of operation, is better than working shifts packing frozen sausages; that's all I need to think about if I'm having difficulties. "