Classic authors should be older than I am, and wiser, and on-top of all their deadlines.

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.

You know I love you,' said the other mother flatly. 'You have a very funny way of showing it,' said Coraline.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.

We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.

The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.