I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own.

Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.

Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.