It delights me that I don't fit the stereotype of an actress.
She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.
Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. Death is just one more thing to be embraced.
I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
I'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic, no matter how lapsed they are.
Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, 'The sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.
The most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them.
It was Jacques Chirac and Schroeder both, who pushed us into a conflict to remove Milosevic.
People fail forward to success.
For the rains and the rivers you need forests and you need to make sure these your forests are all protected, that there is no logging, that there is no charcoal burning and all the activities that destroy the forest. All this really needs to be done so that you can be able to grow good coffee, so that you can have an income, so that you can send your children to school, so that you can buy medicine, so that you can take them to hospitals, so that you can care for the women, especially mothers.