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When I meet children at book signings, they'll bring me photos of when I first met them many years ago when they were reading my picture books, and now they're telling me how much they enjoy my novels.

I love the fact that so many of my readers are intelligent, exceptional, accomplished people with an open-minded love of diversity. But even more than that, I love it when my readers find lasting friendship with others of my readers - knowing that they met through their mutual affection for my books and characters makes me happy!

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.

I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.

When I was a kid, I read books that made me laugh but also made me shiver in terror. I wanted to make books that made other people feel the same way.

I have an affection for tangible objects, like books and pages, but people sure do seem to love their Kindles! We're definitely in the middle of a revolution that will determine how people find, read, and experience stories.

I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought.

I slowly began making a few photos with animals over the years, and I liked how people reacted to them. When I would have the animals on set, I'd notice the way the models would interact with them and there was so much true emotion that you rarely see between two human beings.

A fan once stopped me outside a theatre and gave me as a gift a signed photograph of Sir Laurence Olivier. It was strange, but nice, too.