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Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.

I just assumed that if you were a girl-child, you were supposed to grow up and write.

All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

To be a writer, you need to like spending a lot of time by yourself in the company of imaginary people.

Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it's complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he's able to keep processing that as well.