People who believe they'll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, learn it doesn't work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.

If you read enough Lionel Fanthorpe, your brain starts to turn to jelly and just dribbles out of your ears.

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

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

People talk about escapism as if it's a bad thing... Once you've escaped, once you come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You come back to it with skills, weapons, knowledge you didn't have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.

My parents would frisk me before family events, and find the book, and lock it in the car. And then be disappointed where, somewhere at the event, I would find a book and sit under a table where nobody could get me and go back into book land.