Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive..

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setti….

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words..

I would like people to come into my Dreamworld and then choose to stay..

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present..

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was..

I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately..

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to t….

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint..

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, t….

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses o….

If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us..

The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it..

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all..

I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there..