What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.

I planned on being an English teacher, but I don't know where that went.

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side.

A friend of mine said, no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said, you still look like a Campbell's Soup kid.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.