May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.

There are a lot of artists who've said they'd like to work with me. To be honest, I'm not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story.

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

You know that I love you." And despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true. The other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother's button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.

I loved all books that I could read, and I never knew if I was ready for it until I tried to read it, so I tried to read everything.

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.

I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.