"I was reading Dorian Lynskey’s amazing 33 Revolutions Per Minute book, and I went and investigated this song because he’d written about it. I like it when writing affects the ability to understand music, because I grew up reading NME and Melody Maker, Record Mirror, all telling me why some record was amazing. And then I’d give it a listen and I might not like it at first. But then because the writing about the record was so amazing I would believe that there was something there and I’d often grow to love it. After reading the book, suddenly the lyrics are really flying out at you. “I’ve even stopped believing in prayer”: sometimes one line conveys the utter lack of hope in a situation."

"It [was] unlike almost anything else before it. I think so often movies try to do too much, especially when you try to adapt a big, sprawling novel into a film, and you try to compress hundreds of years or generations. It can work, certainly, if you’re Kurosawa or David Lean or somebody. But a lot of times, the best movies are not novels, they’re poems. That movie is just this beautiful tone poem. I don’t know how many pages of a script that is. It’s probably a very short script, but she used the medium so well. And when we saw that, we thought, “Wow.” We kept thinking about that movie, too, when we were writing, although we ended up writing something much more verbose."

"Throughout my writing life I have relied on Marina Warner to guide me through the hidden realms of literature and culture. She has a wast knowledge of folk stories, religious tracts, legends and classical works from all points of the globe and her analysis of how they continue to be present in our lives and work is always inspiring. In Stranger Magic she tells the story of how Scheherazade’s tales in The Arabian Nights were embraced and appropriated by western culture without ever loosing their original power. As I am working my way towards a new novel which includes the influence of Arabic culture on medieval Icelandic writing Warner has once again provided me with her keen insight into the mechanisms of how stories travel."