KATE MORTON

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

Some say I'm an overnight success. Well, that was a very long night that lasted about 10 years. But while I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I simply love writing good stories, that's my passion.

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.

I love the structural part of the writing process.

There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

A twinge at the edge of her lips and she continued, the soft, slow lilt of recitation: "Ancient walls that sing the distant hours.

She says there are stories everywhere and that people who wait for the right one to come along before setting pen to paper end up with very empty pages.

Oh, Grey, no one really likes keeping secrets. The only thing that makes a secret fun is knowing that you weren't supposed to tell it.

The certainty that she would find what it was she sought just slipped away, until one night she knew there was nothing, no one waiting for her. That no matter how far she walked, how carefully she searched, how much she wanted to find the person she was looking for, she was alone" - The Forgotten Garden

The world was an awfully large place and it wasn't easy to find a person who'd gone missing sixty years earlier, even if that person was oneself.

It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down.

Those who live in memories are never really dead." The House At Riverton

Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she'd run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.

Ah, well. Life's too short for moderation, wouldn't you say?

Life could be cruel enough these days without the truth making it worse.

Happiness in life is not a given, it must be seized.

Doors lead to things and I've never met one I haven't wanted to open.

In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.

I'm good with words, but not the spoken kind; I've often thought what a marvelous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper.

Always remember, with a strong enough will, even the weak can wield great power.

Cassandra's grandmother smiled then, only it wasn't a happy smile. Cassandra thought she knew how it felt to smile like that. She often did so herself when her mother promised her something she really wanted but knew might not happen.

All true readers have a book, a moment when real life is never going to be able to compete with fiction again.