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" 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. "

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" My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me. "

" 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. "

" 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 would love to have faith. When you take God out of the universe, there is no-one taking care us - we are just parcels of meat, collections of atoms - we have a little flowering on Earth, and then we're gone. "

" Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For years, I was quite a militant atheist. I wanted to burn down all the churches or turn them into second-hand record emporiums. "

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

" Total oblivion is the fate of almost everything in this world. I'm very likely to suffer that same fate; my work will probably not be remembered, and if any of it is, if any of those novels is fated to be one of those novels that is still being read 50 or 100 years after it was written, I've probably already written it. "

" I'm still tremendously proud of 'Crimson Petal.' I'm still very emotionally involved with these characters. I still care about them. "

" 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. "

" 'The Crimson Petal and the White' is a book, and it will win or lose the trust of each reader when they begin reading its pages. That relationship will go on. "

" 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. "

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

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

" One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional... Maybe that's a strong word, but how obsessive I am. "

" I was disinclined to have the status of a writer. "

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

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

" History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That's very likely to happen to my books, and if I'm extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Modern politicians like Cameron dream of exerting paternal influence without being seen as paternalistic, of fostering moral behaviour without being considered moralistic. "

" 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. "

" I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells. "

" 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. "

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

" I strive to use references that may still make some kind of sense once our age has passed into history. That robs my writing of a certain connectedness to my time, but potentially might allow it to make sense to people who are not in this time. "