Carole Morin

“I think about toilets a lot, and how awful it must be to be a toilet.”

“Lies are easy to believe in but the truth sounds false.”

“The sum of the rivals is constant.”

“God for all anyone knows could be Cary Grant.”

“Irene the Slut sits on top of the television, the atmosphere of Russian vodka about her skin.”

“I fell in love with money before I had any and it’s a myth that the best romances end in heartbreak.”

“A sinning nun, her face in a plate of cakes, caught my eye as I descended on the moving stair.”

“Writing is hard work. Even when you start with the raw ingredients – a mad family, a sense of humour, talent…it’s hard work. But you do get to sit around in silk pyjamas all day.”

“I read Wuthering Heights when I was seven. I stole a copy from the library. We weren’t allowed books in the house because they’re ‘dirty and dusty’. My mum had a shelf of fake leather books which my dad used to hide whisky behind. I used to die of embarrassment every time a visitor tried to pick up a book and realized it was fake. The library was forbidden so it became exotic and sexy in my imagination. I was dying to get in there and read a book!”

“It’s all real. It came out of my head. Everything in there is real. Even the things invented and imagined.”

“Writing is prophesy. Don’t write anything unless you want it to come true.”

“Writing things down is dangerous. Ink can’t be erased without leaving a mess behind.”

“Betrayal is a cliché … Lies are so suburban. But murder is nice and clean.”

“God isn’t in the details, He’s in the structure.”

“I wanted to wake up with a new name, a new hair colour, and almost the same heart.”

“Imagination is all we have in the end.”

“Characters in novels are all fiction like the world they live in. Of course Vivien Lash has things in common with me but if she actually was me I wouldn’t have been able to invent her. And I’m not plotting to murder my husband! The closest connection between me and my characters is that we live in a city that’s recognisable as London, but it’s a version of London that came out of my head.”

“Murder and sex are both Dionysian. Creative work is first anarchic; and then it’s structured. It’s right brain then left brain. Anarchic then controlled. To be a really good writer, you have to be able to do both. It’s hard work and it takes longer than murder or sex.”

“I like being described as "Sylvia Plath with a sense of humour." But I wouldn’t marry Ted Hughes. He’s dead for one thing.”

“Books were banned from my house, my mum thought they were ‘germ traps’, so I was always sneaking into the library, hiding under a big plant; reading. I was escaping into another world as well as finding out stuff that was news to me.”

“There’s a theory that if you have an interesting childhood then you have enough material to last a lifetime. But that implies that art is always autobiographical when reinvention and imagination are the most important elements. But it doesn’t hurt to have a mad family! Of course I didn’t notice until I’d escaped – when I left home as a teenager on a diplomatic scholarship – how odd my family were.”

“Life-affirming people are a bit creepy and self-consciously life-affirming art is usually awful. My books tend to have happy endings, or at least that’s one way of reading them. My characters are exuberant and funny as well as dark. Duality is the essence of my voice so it’s appropriate for me to have an evil twin to blame things on.”