All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are

Crying wasn't like riding a bike. Give it up, and you quickly forget how it's done.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

He'd thought he was lost, but now he recognized that eternity was around him, like salt from a shaker or stars in the sky.

I read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," all of Shirley Jackson's books, which I loved.

My mother's blood that would last forever after. The blood of my brother, my grandfather, my father.

Do people choose the art that inspires them — do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.