Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

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

He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters.

Just go with it. It won't hurt.' I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.

I like comic conventions. I genuinely like comic conventions. I like wandering around from table to table; I like wandering up and down Artist's Alley and saying "Hello" to people. I like hanging out on the DC booth. I can't do that anymore. I'd like to, but I can't. I physically can't. If I stop moving, somebody will come up to me with something to sign, and if I sign it, somehow it's like ants sensing sugar. There will be fifty or a hundred people around me and then fire marshals will come and then I'm trapped in a crowd. It's bizarre.

I think that the biggest, quickest and hardest thing to learn for a writer is that what we think of as the unchanging verities of story are a load of bollocks. Absolute rubbish. There are no unchanging verities.