Comment from the book world in January 2003

'I found that I could write poems and short stories at the same time because they required the same sort of effort. But once you're writing a novel it's a larger undertaking and it does take up quite a lot of 'head space' and I've found that poems and novels don't go very well together for me. Writing a novel is a different process and part of what's different is the day-today lifestyle. You can compose poetry and short stories while you're walking, on a train, or a plane, although walking is better, sometimes even when you're asleep. but with a novel you need to get down to it and have a place where you can do it, with piles of books around you for research.'

Tobias Hill, author of The Cryptographer, interviewed by Jane Ellis in Publishing News

'Reading is an especially focused experience, unfolding in private time, and that makes a fundamental difference. A play cannot be stopped and reprised in the way that pages can be reread, whether to relish something good or understand something better. A novel is all present at once, and can be gone over and back, re-entered, skimmed, sampled or devoured, just as required...

'The better the novel, the richer the possibilities it offers in this as in all its other dimensions (of pleasure-giving and the like). Perhaps "great literature" is literature which, among its other qualities, best discloses to us different worlds, or deeper aspects of our own world, and teaches us how to feel more generously, discriminate more finely, and understand more comprehensively, as a result.'

A C Grayling in The Times

'Perhaps one reason the publishing industry is enjoying only slow growth is that we do not listen closely enough to the market, because we read too far apart from the mainstream of the market...

'Any doubt that a gap exists between the reading habits of publishing pros and those of the general public can be dispelled with a simple test. The adult fiction authors most widely read in the past two decades - that is, the authors who have sold the most books - probably have been Nora Roberts, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton and Stephen King. And then there's the fresher crop of blockbuster commercial authors like Michael Connelly, David Baldacci, Laurell K. Hamilton and Jan Karon. How many books by each of these authors have we read? If the number is few or none, perhaps it would be wise to read more of them, in order to understand, to appreciate and even to learn to love what so much of our market loves.'

Jeff Zaleski in Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/

'Having kids, I became a whole new person. It changed me, enabled me to write to the extent I associate babies and fiction. Far from feeling held back by children, I felt they catapulted me in to it...

'I love taking the prosaic and making it extraordinary. Writers don't get enough credit for that... I don't want to glamorise. I want the reader to say, "Oh, that's just how it is." I love writers who take my breath away because they've pointed out something I've felt and didn't realise I did. I'm constantly striving for that as a reader and writer.'

Julie Myerson, author of Something Might Happen, interviewed in The Times by Candida Crewe

'I'm a children's writer. It seems like a simple, elemental thing to be. I feel as close to parents telling stories in the dark as I do to the world of printed literature. I write for young hearts and minds, for readers who are still close to the start of things, who experience elemental joys and fears, who haven't grown tired and cynical, who are still excited by the newness of their world. At the best of moments I feel as if I draw, like the storytelling parents do, on ancient energies'"

Children's writer David Almond in The Times