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

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.

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.

Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

Lots of people have objections to prizes of all types, and it would be extraordinary if everybody agreed on anything that's worthwhile - they never do.

I've never really considered doing stand up, but I have done readings/spoken word things fairly often in which I'll just tell a bunch of stories and run off at the mouth. I'm a big tangent person.

A brave heart? It feels like a swollen and aching thing in my chest.

Concentration is the key that opens up to the child the latent treasures within him.

Either I conquer Istanbul or Istanbul conquers me.

Drugs are for idiots. I'm never going to be that person.

Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.

I've never really heard anybody imitating anything of mine the way they do with Edward Van Halen's stuff.