I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world.

I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.

People are always the start for me... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead... these are all people to me.

As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.

Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote.

I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped.

I like films, or some films, and would be intrigued to see my work on screen.

I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.

I never know where I am going, though. That is part of what makes it so wonderful. And after all, who does?

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself.

No one is ever ordinary.

Pirates have always fascinated me.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

When I am fascinated by something, I like to play with it.

Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.

I submitted manuscripts to publishers. This was not so much a feeling that I should be published as a wish to escape the feared and hated drudgery of normal work.

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!