She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

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

I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.

I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.

Never stop paying attention to things. Never make your mind up finally. Do not hold beliefs.