People whose lives are not balanced by a healthy love of money suffer from an appalling obsession with personal integrity.

Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same.