"More then ten years ago I started to write a children's book. It was for my daughter, Holly, who was five years old. I wanted it to have a girl as a heroine, and I wanted it to be refreshingly creepy.

I started to write a story about a girl named Coraline. I thought that the story would be five or ten pages long. The story itself had other plans...

It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It's the strangest book I've written, it took the longest time to write, and it's the book I'm proudest of."

Copyright © 2003 by Neil Gaiman. All rights reserved.