I'm more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I'm at that place where I hope that the book knows what it's doing because right now I don't have a clue - I'm writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it's actually going to lead him.

Anyone who calls you "little lady" has already excluded you from the set of people worth listening to.

Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn't she the one who killed her children?

If writing a novel is a year's exile to a foreign country, writing a short story is a weekend spent somewhere exotic. They're much more like vacations, more exciting and different, and you're off.

I'm never quite sure if I'm me when I'm dressed up.

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

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.