Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

Deadlines comes as a surprise....superb: a new genre, in fact, combining the pleasures of list-making with that of last-minute eaves-dropping.

The telling of stories creates the real world.

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

Existing libraries, in their very being, seem to question the authority of those in power.

The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.