He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

In many ways, it was much, much harder to get the first book contract. The hardest thing probably overall has been learning not to trust people, publicists and so forth, implicitly.

The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.

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.

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.

The lovely thing about writing comics for so many years is that comics is a medium that is mistaken for a genre. It's not that there are not genres within comics, but because comics tend to be regarded as a genre in itself, content becomes secondary; as long as I was doing a comic, people would pick it up.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.