Our language is gone, though here and there a word survives. Some of our music and dance also. Sometimes we see bits of our ways in what the others do, a gesture here and there, a fragment of a design at the edge of a collar or on a belt buckle.

You have to push yourself every time you sit down to write; you should make everything you produce better than the last thing; you need to be your own toughest critic and you need to learn from the things you're still not getting right. And you have to be stubborn as hell.

Families! They're sort of like credit cards: I can't live with them, and I can't write young adult fiction without them.

Head for the Altai mountains / But leave the souvenirs in the middens; / The locals are quick with an axe.