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" Once you finish a book, you let it go out into the world to seek its fortune. "

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" 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. "

" If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls. "

" In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare. "

" Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend. "

" I wrote ghost stories because I'd always enjoyed reading them, and they seemed to be fizzling out... I don't take them terribly seriously. It's like a cake, with ingredients. "

" Kindness is a sort of love without being love. "

" I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts. "

" Yorkshire is so much part of me. "

" Love has an enormous number of connotations, and if somebody is a person who does kind acts as a way of life, if they are generally disposed to being caring and loving and doing things for other people, then kindness is a much stronger word than we make it out to be. "

" It's easy to write a short story and frighten people for five pages, but to work at length, when you do it as in 'The Turn Of The Screw' or 'A Christmas Carol,' it's different; you have to build it and build it. "

" The one thing the Victorians really believed in was philanthropy. I think we've forgotten the obligation to be philanthropic. I think we need smaller government, but I want to make it clear I'm not the Sarah Palin of the Cotswolds. "

" Though they don't always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you've got to turn the screw very, very slowly. "

" I was an only child who was never really good at anything else. I had no other option. I could write; I wanted to write; I wrote. Otherwise, I was unemployable. "

" It would be difficult to write a convincing ghost story set on a sunny day in a big city. "

" The New Testament is about loving other people as you love yourself. That means caring for them and looking after them and being kind to them. "

" Theology is endlessly interesting in that you can study it without believing in anything. I do believe, but you don't have to. I got very caught up in the 11th-century monasticism and the Cistercians. My dissertation was about Aelred of Rievaulx and one of his books. "

" Flashback in film rarely works. "

" I'm not one of those people who hates Amazon because they're big. Why pay a third more for the same thing? "

" A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do. "

" Every reader re-creates a novel - in their own imagination, anyway. It's only entirely the writer's when nobody else has read it. "

" I don't really do jolly. I don't know why, I just don't. "

" Films always make everyone else rich save the author. "

" Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right. "

" I was taught to whistle as a little girl by an undertaker. I used to sit in his workshop, watching him planing wood for the coffins, and he used to whistle all the time - and eventually I started whistling, too. I can whistle anything, particularly trumpet tunes from Classic FM. "