Jeanette Winterson

"Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour."

Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)

Doris Lessing

"I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some years later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have."

Doris Lessing

Susanna Clarke

"After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue."

Susanna Clarke