Cities have distinct personalities. It's a matter of knowing it.

Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible.

Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

I didn’t look to the shore much after this first long and memorable glimpse. I looked up at Heaven and her court of mythical creatures fixed forever in the all powerful and inscrutable stars. Ink black was the night beyond them, and they so like jewels that old poetry came back to me, the sound even of hymns sung only by men.

Cities have distinct personalities. It's a matter of knowing it.

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.