I've always been attracted to stories about rebels - things that are unusual and sometimes dangerous.

The jungle is alive. It’s dangerous as a living nightmare and brimful of hostility.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

Taking a risk is like swimming in a pool. You do not know that you are going to drown until you have tried to swim.

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm. – On Starlit Seas