I never base characters on real people - you can get into so much trouble that way!

OK," Josh said evenly, "I've seen men made of mud, I guess I can accept spying rats. Do they talk?" he wondered aloud. Don't be ridiculous," Flamel snapped, "They're rats." Josh really didn't think it was a ridiculous suggestion.

Good or bad is a matter of perspective. I met an immortal hunami once, a man called William Shakespeare, who wrote that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Making sure that the geography and timelines work is always the hardest part of writing. But you owe it to the readers to get it right!

Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move this idea forward.

The day we stop learning is the day we die.

I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American?