Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.

We are creatures of story.

Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book.

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

For you where never my blood sister so no more shall I call you little sister