London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.

Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.

I was writing the kind of comic that would make me, at age 26 or 27, go down to a comic book store every month and spend my $2. That was my starting point. I wanted to write a comic that I would read. And that's still my agenda.

What's your name,' Coraline asked the cat. 'Look, I'm Coraline. Okay?' 'Cats don't have names,' it said. 'No?' said Coraline. 'No,' said the cat. 'Now you people have names. That's because you don't know who you are. We know who we are, so we don't need names.

When I was a kid and a young man I read everything. When I was about 23, I was incredibly lucky in that I wound up with several book review columns, which meant that I had to read huge amounts of stuff that was outside my experience and outside my comfort zone. I think every young writer should be forced to read the kind of stuff they would not normally read for pleasure.

I know that this is the internet, and we're all anonymous and all that, but really. It doesn't hurt to try to be nice.