Quote

I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.

All of my books, which are supposedly, I mean they're called YA novels, my hope is that adults would find no reason not to read them if they read them.

When I was young, there was no such thing as YA. You simply went from reading children's novels to reading adult novels. So one year, I was reading Tove Jansson, and the next year, I was reading Stephen King.

I became a children's author by accident.

I didn't consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn't think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.

When I was growing up, there actually wasn't a lot of YA literature as it exists today. Most of the YA that I read was from the '60s and '70s, older than me.

I didn't plan to write YA - I had a story that simply wasn't working as a straight-up fantasy novel.

When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.

I don't really consider myself a novelist, it just came out purely by accident.

One of my biggest goals, especially with writing YA novels, is just to have people enjoy reading.