the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

I really feel like I'm a liberal because I'm a Catholic, because I took the words of the New Testament to heart.

The problem with freedom is that you just can't go back. Once people see what it means to be free people, you can't go back. So they're going to keep nattering on about this and that, and maybe they'll make another stab at de-funding the fabulous Planned Parenthood or something of the sort. To my mind, it's just not going to work.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.