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.

I worry about anthropomorphism as a form of self-deception. (The Christian religion is an anthropomorphic account of the universe.)

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.