"Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes - characters even - caught in the fibres of your clothes, and when you open the new book they are still with you."
— Diane Setterfield

"Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else. "
— Zadie Smith

"Loneliness is a drug, a narcotic; it grows through veins, through nerves and muscles; it assumes some right of possession over your body and mind; it feeds itself, and creates its own requirement. Loneliness and solitude are walls."
— R.J. Ellory

"Blame is a bitter and indigestible thing, even when the blame is a coat you cut for yourself, even when you stood right there and got yourself measured so you could wear it right."
— R.J. Ellory

"After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it."
— Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture)