I have so little patience with the whole Y.A. book thing. As far as I'm concerned, you either read books for children or you read books for adults.

Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile. Travel abroad and learn to live in other cultures. That's one of the things about teaching abroad.

In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.

For me, any fiction of nobles and swords necessarily has to be a story of corruption, injustice and savagely violent conflict - because any other treatment is going to have all the heft and realistic honesty of a bedtime fairy tale for five year olds.

We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?

The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.