Q: How did you think up the name "Coraline"?
A: It was from typing “Caroline” and it coming out wrong. Larry Niven, the science fiction author, said in an essay that writers should treasure their typing mistakes. Once I typed it, I knew it was somebody’s name, and I wanted to know what happened to her.

I recently discovered it was actually a real name, although it’s not been used much in English-speaking countries for a long time. And, at the turn of the last century, it was a name for a brand of corset.

Q: Coraline is called "A Fairy Tale". Do you really believe in fairies?
A: Well, the only fairy in Coraline has been dead for hundreds of years, and some people read the book and never notice her at all. Coraline’s a fairy tale in the same way that Hansel and Gretel is a fairy tale.

As for believing in fairies ... many years ago I wrote the copyright notice for a comic called The Books of Magic, in which I said words to the effect of “All the characters, human or otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the faerie folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.”   A position I still wholeheartedly support and defend.

Q: Did your parents insist on cooking "recipes" rather than regular food?
A: Actually, that was me that did that, and I stole that aspect of Coraline from my son Mike, when he was young, and still called Mikey. If ever I made anything adventurous he’d shake his head and say, “Dad, you’ve made a recipe, haven’t you?” and he’d head off to the freezer compartment to find a box of microwaveable french fries.

Whenever we’d go out to eat he’d order peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches, until one day a waiter persuaded him to explore the rest of the menu, and he’s never looked back.

Q: How did you deal with long, boring, rainy days in the school holidays?
A: Well, on the good ones I’d get someone to drop me off at the local library, and I’d read. On the bad ones I’d stare out of the window and wonder what to do, and eventually wind up rereading the Narnia books.

Q: What was the door that you were most scared to go through?
A: Coraline’s door really was in the “drawing room” of our house. The house, long since knocked down, had been divided into two, and behind the door at the far end of the room was a red-brick wall. I was never certain there would always be a brick wall there, though.

Q: Are things really magical, or do you make them magical by believing in them?
A: I think most things are pretty magical, and that it’s less a matter of belief than it is one of just stopping to notice.

Q: What is the biggest key you have on your keyring and what does it open?
A: When I was a boy I collected keys, for no real reason I could explain, and somewhere in the attic I still have a box filled with them, keys of all sizes and shapes and designs.

There aren’t any fun ones on the everyday key-ring, though: the biggest opens the cabin, overlooking a lake, where I go and write each day. The cabin doesn’t have a phone, which helps.

Q: What chocolate do you eat first if you're given a whole box?
A: In a perfect world, I would first identify the chocolates from the Identify Your Chocolate guide and eat something with a name like “Caramel Surprise”. In the real world, I tend normally to accidentally pull out the chocolate truffles. By the way, I cannot see the point of 'tangerine cremes'.

Q: Why do the batteries in things always run out just when you really need them?
A: It’s one of the rules. I don’t try to explain them.  I just live here.

Q: Did you let your children read Coraline before anyone else?
A: Well, I read it to Maddy, who was six when I finished it; and I forgot to give it to Holly (who was around sixteen), so she just read it. “hope you weren’t too old for it," I told her, when she was done. "I don’t think you can be too old for Coraline," she said, which made me very happy.

Q: What is your favorite time of day?
A: Really, really early in the morning, just as the sun is coming up. I don’t see it too often, but I love it when I do.

Q: Have you ever had your fortune told?
A: Once, while waiting for a theatre to open in New York, by an old woman. She told me I would die on an island. It hasn’t happened yet.

Q: The CORALINE illustrations seem very different from most of the Dave McKean pictures I've seen; was that your idea, or did Mr McKean mutate upon reading the manuscript?
A: Dave mutated on reading the manuscript, and started growing extra hands and feet and noses.... not really. Actually, Dave has lots and lots of styles (I don't think there's a style he can't work in) and he just picked the one he felt was right for CORALINE. He uses about three different styles for THE WOLVES IN THE WALLS – the people are painted, the wolves are drawn, and the jam-pots are all photographed.

Q: How did you come up with the black-button eyes in CORALINE? (Was this anything to do with the black contact lenses that were so awfully effective on the Angel Islington in NEVERWHERE?
A: Nope, CORALINE was begun before NEVERWHERE was made.

Q: As CORALINE really comes to life by the way you tell the story, do you think the whole thing will lose some of it's Athmos---fear when translated?
A: It depends on the translator. When I win awards in foreign countries, I know that a lot of it is due to the translator doing a good job.

Q: Did you write CORALINE from your imagination, or from a dream you had?
A: I wrote it from my imagination, very slowly. None of it came directly from dreams, but I wanted it to have a dream-like quality to it.

Q: Why did you choose beetles for the 'OTHER' mother to eat? Do beetles freak you out the most?
A: Well, they seemed the right sort of thing to eat from a paper bag. Spiders would run away, and ants would just crawl out. Beetles are slow enough that I could imagine someone picking them from a bag and eating them, with a crunch. They don't freak me out the most - there are things I could have put in the bag that would have been worse, but they were just the right amount of unpleasant.

Q: What is the difference between a flat and an apartment?
A: The biggest difference is that flats are apartments in England. If you go to a dictionary it will say things like '5. A floor, loft, or story in a building; especially, a floor of a house, which forms a complete residence in itself.' or '7: a suite of rooms usually on one floor of an apartment house.

Q: Do you know someone who reminds you of the other mother?
A: No, thank Heavens. I don't think I'd want to meet her in reality--it was bad enough on paper.

Q: I liked your book because... Coraline was brave and she looks a lot like me!
A: That's why I liked the book. I was very proud of her. Very brave, and sensible when she had to be sensible.

Q: I just finished reading CORALINE and I loved it! Do you think you will make a sequel?
A: I don't think so. It couldn't make CORALINE a better book for me to write CORALINE GOES TO AFRICA or something, and it might make it worse.

Q: How old is Coraline?
A: Good question. She's actually older than she looks.

Q: Do the rats have any plans for World domination?
Yes.

Q: Ever eaten a beetle?
A: Not knowingly. But the colour red in foods is often cochineal, which is made from a ground up beetle, so I'm sure I must have done.

Q: What do you do when you have this magnificent idea, and you know where it must go, but in getting there you draw a blank? As a writer, you must have this problem. Did you experience this with CORALINE?
A: Yes, but I cheated and wrote other things in the meanwhile.

Q: How do you feel about the comparisons to Alice in Wonderland?
A: Well, I suppose people have to compare it to something, and both CORALINE and Alice in Wonderland are about girls in strange places. I don't think the comparison goes much further than that, really. (One critic compared it to a story by a Victorian writer named Lucy Clifford, which was very wise, but Lucy Clifford has been out of print for a long time, whereas everyone knows Alice.)

Q: Once you had her name, how did you discover what Coraline was like?
A: I wrote a book, very quietly, and watched, and listened.

Q: If Coraline were to have a favorite room in your house, what do you think it would be and why?
A: Well, I think that it might be fun to explore the attic. It's filled with things... I still wonder what's up there.

Q: Does CORALINE feature any gods? They seem to be a constant in most of your work.
A: Good question.

Q: I'm 11 years old and I have never liked freaky books, until one of my teachers read CORALINE to me. How did you come up with this idea of the other mother and father?
A: I'm really not sure. I remember as a kid worrying that I'd get home and my parents would have moved house and forgotten to tell me. And what if the people who moved into the house looked just like my parents... but they weren't? It's the kind of daydream you never entirely forget...

Q: The other-mother is sometimes referred to as the beldam. Is this a typographical error for bedlam, much like Coraline and Caroline?
A: Nope. It's a real word, from the French, belle dame, meaning an old hag or witch.
beldam
n 1: an ugly evil-looking old woman [syn: hag, beldame, witch, crone] 2: a woman of advanced age [syn: beldame].

Q: CORALINE was written in the most wonderful 'British storybook voice' that I remember from books I had as a small child. Did you do this intentionally?
A: More or less, in that I'm English, and I know that voice inside and out, which made it an easy sort of voice to write CORALINE in.

Q: Does CORALINE have the same type of cleverness that you usually seem to have with your other writings?
A: No, it has a different type of cleverness.