Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. Its the people who are always on the brink of crisis who dont hit bottom who are in trouble.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.