Quotes from Simon Toyne

The largest two books I've ever read more than once are 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens and 'The Stand' by Stephen King, about 1,200 pages each.

Quest stories are about the oldest form of narrative there is, and they're also the perfect metaphor for life because we're all on a journey trying to figure out where we're going and who we are. 'Solomon Creed' is just doing it with more danger and guns involved.

The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.

Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.

We have long suspected that the faceless organisations that run our world - be it the church, multinational conglomerates or the government - keep things from us.

It's interesting to note that when something like a virus tries to poison us, the first thing our bodies do is heat up. We burn away the infection. Maybe that's what Earth is doing to us.