There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.

There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.

I hope the strong women out there aren't quiet and they don't go away, because when people attack you for speaking, the best way to drive them nuts is to smile and carry on speaking, louder, more wisely, more intensely, more articulately than ever.

I still love the book-ness of books, the smell of books: I am a book fetishist—books to me are the coolest and sexiest and most wonderful things there are.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.