You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not.

Going to Comic-Con for me is always hard and weird, so it just makes me feel guilty. There's always a hundre thousand people out there who have copies of things that I've written and they really want signed and they're not going to get them signed.

Even the proudest spirit can be broken with love.

I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist.

I have no plans to love you," said Coraline. "No matter what. You can't make me love you.

To journalists my move from comics to films to best-selling novels was resembling those little evolutionary maps too much, where you see the fish, and then it can walk, and then it's an ape and then it gets up on its hind legs and finally it is a man. I didn't like that. I didn't like the fact that there was something rather amphibious about me - at least in their heads - back when I was writing comics. So I like continuing to write comics, if only because it points out that I haven't just started to walk upright or left the water.

From meetings and partings none can ever escape. Nor from magic.