Let's be off before he gets his great horsey teeth into my poor lines of verse!

There are not so many mythical creatures from Inkheart.

The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.

believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things. Clive Barker, Abarat

Second, there are so many magical places in books that you cant go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.

I have two Iceland horses, a very hairy dog called Looney, and a guinea pig.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.

Every single dayI find it hard to sayI could be yours aloneYou will see somedayThat all along the wayI was yours to hold.

Talk uses up ideas. Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.

It's always so much fun to create backstory. Even if there are more clues in the script, you still always have to invent a lot for yourself. I think that comes naturally.

You never know what the American public is going to do, but you know that they will do it all at once.

To obey God is better than sacrifice.

'Champagne' and 'breathmint' are the first two words all Oscar winners hear.

Very little happens in my books.

Whatever happens, just keep smiling and lose yourself in Love.

And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.

We have very beautiful bad weather here at present - rain, wind, thunder - but with splendid effects; that's why I like it.