A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative. That's what I want as a reader - I want to be confident that the book will do its job.

Your reader is interested in a guileless, fresh, first-time-we-talked-about-it way. What a great liberation that is. And teenagers, if you respect them, will follow you a lot further than adults will, without fear of being a genre that they may not like or have been told not to like. They just want a story.

How you leave the reader is so important - not the climax; I call it the 'exit feeling'.

No one wants to read an apologetic book.

The best characters in books are always the difficult ones, and why would you want to fall in love with someone difficult? The ones I'd fall in love with are the ones I'd definitely keep out of a book.

Online is such a brilliant, brilliant way to connect with young readers - even if they just want to tweet, 'Hey, I read your book!' - that, absolutely, I connect with that. But I also treat writing as solitary and keep it to myself as long as I can.