My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.

I liked, I admit, that we didn’t pretend there hadn’t been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack.

Well-read people are less likely to be evil.

It is not very polite to interrupt a person, of course, but sometimes if the person is very unpleasant you can hardly stop yourself.

It turns out she is Canadian, my editor, and so she drinks like a fish. So she wasn't a lightweight at all. And in the morning, she said that the idea still seemed like a good one, and here we are.

Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.

I can't imagine why you would want to take your child to see what the career of a writer is like, because it mostly consists of sitting in a room typing, or going to the library and looking something up. Those are not exciting things to watch.