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All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.

I really have lived in books. Books are friends. They are some of the friends that make you who you are.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I love seeing my book on shelves and getting letters from people who liked the book. I love telling stories and having other people tell stories to me.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

I read fantasy books like the Harry Potter books, 'Twilight,' also biographies, and I like to read about people who have been through stuff like wars or lost their families - real life stuff, you know? I like to read about their experiences and how they coped with that.