People want to forget the impossible. It makes their world safer.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

Then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.

There's a but, isn't there?" said Coraline. "I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.

You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.