Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.

If there's one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse.

You are young, and in love. Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.

Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.

We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves.

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.