I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.

He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.