Too much talking these days. Talk talk talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence.

I don't believe in "writer's block". I try and deal with getting stuck by having more than one thing to work on at a time. And by knowing that even a hundred bad words that didn't exist before is forward progress.

Sometimes I think that ideas float through the atmosphere like huge squishy pumpkins, waiting for heads to drop on.

She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how.

Things bloosom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.