You cannot teach somebody to write a masterpiece, but you can certainly teach them how to improve their writing skills. And you can teach them that they can make their own voices more effective by being able to communicate more clearly and forcefully. It makes people feel more capable when they can write - for instance to make a request - of a politician - and when they are able to receive a reply.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is 'reader.'

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

Keep an eye on the weather, which is changing faster than predicted, and on the new diseases escaping or being made, even as we speak. It's a race between new tech and biosphere bankruptcy, I'd say.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.