The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them--with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself.

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.