Outside, the September air was enticingly fragrant, yellow with pollen and rich, lemony sunlight.

My sorrow is I used to read all the time and now, as a writer, I don't have the time to read.

In "Faithful," Ray Bradbury is discussed a lot. The characters read "The Illustrated Man."

I think love is a huge factor in fiction and in real life. Is there a risk? Always. In fiction and in life

In the darkest hour of winter, when the starlings had all flown away, Gretel Samuelson fell in love. It happened the way things are never supposed to happen in real life, like a sledgehammer, like a bolt from out of the blue. One minute she was a seventeen year-old senior in high school waiting for a Sicilian pizza to go; the next one she was someone whose whole world had exploded, leaving her adrift in the Milky Way, so far from earth she was walking on stars.

You don't fight for peace sister,' Nahara told me, 'You embrace it.

Any institution becomes a community - whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people.