Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

Quite suddenly Meggie felt fear rise in her like black brackish water, she felt lost, terribly lost, she felt it in every part of her. She didn't belong here! What had she done?

Why did death make life taste so much sweeter? Why could the heart love only what it could also lose?

What was a slap for ten pages of escapism, ten pages far from everything that made him unhappy, ten pages of real life instead of the monotony that other people called the real world?

I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.