You think you're being given all of these things: phones that can communicate with other devices, car service that's better than a taxi, all of these amazing things that are available to you at any time. It isn't until you've swum across the river that you can start to see the negative aspects of it all.

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.

She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how.

The young woman was crying, in the way that grownups cry, keeping it inside as much as they can, and hating it when it still pushes out at the edges, making them ugly and funny-looking on the way.

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.