I like going into a school matinee. I like to be behind the stage because there's a spy-hole and what you see is the best moment in all theatre..

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever..

I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when….

This gardener will be out in the very early morning and from late afternoon, attentive to small changes in the quality of light and the atmosphere, a….

The more contemplative gardener, seeing the garden as a whole, the design of it, and its nature as a still place of delight and refreshment, will wai….

Of all human activities, apart from the procreation of children, gardening is the most optimistic and hopeful. The gardener is by definition one who ….

Ghost stories ... tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us..

A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life..

Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. ….

I collect Victorian automata and coming across them in the dark does give you a little shudder..

It's just occurred to me that some horror films everybody laughs because they're so ridiculous and they're so frightening in a way, the filmmakers' a….

Gardeners celebrate the influence of time. If we have had a late cold spring followed by a desiccating drought, autumn may be the most soft and golde….

Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified becaus….

There is a continuity about the garden and an order of succession in the garden year which is deeply pleasing, and in one sense there are no breaks o….

My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side….

I'm really quite hard to scare so it was about mining times when I have jumped, and what creeps me out..

I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too..

A man may be accused of cowardice for fleeing away from all manner of physical dangers but when things supernatural, insubstantial and inexplicable t….

The key word for my book The Woman in Black is unsettling... because you're not terrified all of the time or even frightened, but you're unsettled an….

Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow tr….

I read a lot of ghost stories because I was writing a ghost story. I didn't think at all I was writing a horror or a thriller or whatever because it ….