Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.

How big are souls anyway?" asked Coraline. The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned against the back wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes.

Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.

Something told him that something was coming to an end. Not the world, exactly. Just the summer. There would be other summers, but there would never be one like this. Ever again.

Libraries are our friends.

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.

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.