Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.

I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.

We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.

As I get older, I use less jewelry - necklace or earrings each morning, not both my clothes are getting more basic - fewer colours and simpler cuts and my make-up is stripped back to basics.

I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,’ she said. ‘And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it's gone. I don't know which is worse — to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.’ Falling Angels

Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think.

You know I don’t listen to market gossip,” she began, “but it is hard not to hear it when my daughter’s name is mentioned.

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

Say something worth the words.

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

The sign of a masterpiece: A painting when there's a lack of resolution.

Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don't know if it's because older women are more confident, or just that we don't care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write I take out adjectives and adverbs and keep the description to a minimum.

I find that when I come out of the library I'm in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.

Over his shoulder I saw a star fall. It was me.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

It's those little daily incidents of life that are dramatic, and if you put a frame around it , suddenly they become much bigger and much more important than you ever imagined.