I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.

I am basically a pretty good autodidact. I can teach myself things.

I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari.

I've always operated with a great deal of self-doubt. Every time I start a new book it's like, well, this one will destroy the career and I have to overcome that feeling especially in the first hundred pages of the book.

What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.

The only thing we can't buy more of is time." she said. "And dodo birds. We can't buy any more of them. they're extinct. And dinosaurs.