He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

Coraline shivered. She preferred her other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.

When you say words a lot they don't mean anything. Or maybe they don't mean anything anyway, and we just think they do.

It's a wonderful thing, as a writer, to be given parameters and walls and barriers.

Can you believe it? Fifty miles from McDonald's. I didn't think there was anywhere in the world that was fifty miles from McDonald's.

When I was very young, I would occasionally stick 'f****' where I knew something contentious might happen so that the editor could remove the word 'f***' very proudly and leave whatever else was around it.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.