People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

Perhaps all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels male as well as female.

I had bohemian parents in Seattle in the last '60s living in a houseboat. My dad wrote science fiction novels and painted big murals and oil paintings.

My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.

When you're 14 anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2 000 fantasy novels you start to realize that some of those books well they weren't really good. OK let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is it makes the series limited you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis.

When I first thought of the idea for 'Sweet Valley High ' I loved the idea of high school as microcosm of the real world. And what I really liked was how it moved things on from 'Sleeping Beauty'-esque romance novels where the girl had to wait for the hero. This would be girl-driven very different I decided - and indeed it is.

Because if one is writing novels today concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons for wasted effort.

All humanity is passion without passion religion history novels art would be ineffectual.

I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music architecture novels and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment neither of them all that conventional but I'm not ready to choose between them yet let alone settle down to the process of writing.

One already feels like an anachronism writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.

When you're my age and you see a story you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.