Tobsha Learner quotes:

Two bones fell down my chimney and into the bedroom this morning. Hysterical thing to happen to a thriller writer. Murderous ravens perhaps?

No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university course on feminist history (with a strong Marxist slant): spinsters are a threat to patriarchy.

Starting a new novel is a little like starting a new relationship -- you have to be prepared to commit for at least three years and put up with the domestic tedium as well as the emotional highs!

As a reader I like both great characterization and fast moving plots. The challenge is to balance the both and not compromise one for the other.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.

Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.

The novelist is more a marathon runner than long-distance runner and the kind of courage it takes working in such isolation cannot be underestimated. I really respect my fellow writers on this front.

A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.

Danger is an aphrodisiac.

Death strips all men of dignity.

Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.

Indeed, you become what you eat. In which case I am an onion. Layered, slightly sour and guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes.

Living is a hazardous profession.

Love wasn't a piece of music you could play over and over again with different interpretations. It actually needed to be improvised as you went along.

The worst enemy is one whose doctrines are founded in hate and are thus beyond debate.

Trust is won not given.

I had made the fatal mistake of believing in his touch, as if the intelligence of his hands, our orgasms, the way he penetrated me, had affected him as much as it had affected me. Perhaps this is the catch cry of the egoist: I love, therefore I must be loved. Perhaps it is the Achilles' heel of my gender.

Believe, my child. Faith is the food of survival.

Be bad, and if you can't be bad be worse.

Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed.

I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.

Intelligence is power; it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue. Find out all the facts and stamp out the fire. Demystify.

It seems to me that women are freed from their responsibilities only when they are merry widows or eccentric old spinsters.

Memory is a great deceiver: it embroiders until naught is left but the glory and the pleasure.

So many of man's actions appear to have no immediate consequence but, concealed, do their work until finally all catches up and forms a complex web of cause and effect.

This may be the very nature of love, a passion as fickle as the sea, full of certainty when the object of desire is absent, yet dubious when confronted again with the lover's presence.

To be desired by those who are themselves highly desirable is in itself an aphrodisiac.

We cannot choose the times we live in. Just as, sometimes, we cannot choose whom we love.

You must appreciate that love is the last reason for which a man marries.