In real life during the last decade of the twentieth century, Rumpelstiltskin would probably get the queen's daughter. He would no doubt addict her to heroin, turn her out as a prostitute, confiscate her earnings, beat her for pleasure, hack her to pieces, and escape justice by claiming that society's intolerance for bad-tempered, evil-minded trolls had driven him temporarily insane.

The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.

Reality isn't what it used to be.

Never, never try to scope the market.

Sometimes many publishers prefer that you write the same book every time, but I have a low boredom threshold so that isn't going to happen.

Night has patterns that can be read less by the living than by the dead.

Books had shown me, however, that all people everywhere wanted their lives to have purpose and meaning. This longing was universal.