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.

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept.

It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

It does not matter where you come from, if you walk toward the truth you will reach it, whatever path you take.

If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do.