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.

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

If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.

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

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

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.

Pirates have always fascinated me.

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

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?

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.

No one is ever ordinary.

It gets cold in the desert at night particularly up in the mountains the stars hammer on the rock and strike frost.

The guilty are always the most prone to establish complementary guilt and the most unforgiving thereafter.

No one asks a robot what he wants.

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

The worst vulgarity is to avoid vulgarity solely on the grounds that it is vulgar.

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.

Animals often strike us as passionate machines.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development.

Towns are suffering from all these things, we should unite until we are all satisfied, man cannot be killing each other as if we were animals, as if we had no culture; that is a lack of culture.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

I've always been fascinated by the way that children and animals suffer stoically in a way that I don't think adults do.

Ever occur to you why some of us can be this much concerned with animals suffering? Because government is not. Why not? Animals don't vote.

Animals are reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal. Difficult standards for people to live up to.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

It's been my dream to have four babies by 30. I look after animals, so I'd have a lot to give my kids.

Yes, I've kissed a lot of guys. I like to kiss, but that's it. I don't go home with anyone. I sleep with my animals, like my baby monkey, Brigitte Bardot.

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

The tabloids are like animals, with their own behavioural patterns. There's no point in complaining about them, any more than complaining that lions might eat you.

Early experiences convinced me that animals can and do have quite distinct personalities.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

God sleeps in the minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.