"Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.

I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyways.

She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.

You don't get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.

He..." Richard began. "The marquis. Well, you know, to be honest, he seems a little bit dodgy to me." Door stopped. The steps dead-ended in a rough brick wall. "Mm," she agreed. "He's a little bit dodgy in the same way that rats are a little bit covered in fur.

So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams.

Fiction takes us to places that we would never otherwise go, and puts us behind eyes that are not our own.