...and again she wished for Sherwood, and the dappled roof of leaves that never weighed upon her. She pulled her scarf closer around her and thought, I would rather live in a hut in the woods; a hut like the one of my first memories, with a clean-swept dirt floor, and a brown-eyed boy watching me from behind his mother's skirts as I watched him from behind mine.

I don't differentiate in the way that the genre creators want differentiation to be made. I feel that I have never written children's or YA stories particularly.

It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.

I advise those who want to become writers to study veterinary medicine, which is easier. You don't want to be a writer unless you have no choice - and if you have no choice, good luck to you.

...My friend, there are some things that I cannot tell you. Some I will tell you in time; some, others will tell you; some you may never know, or you may be the first to find the answers.

But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leav­ing out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you. Can I trust him? What do I have to lose?