Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.

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

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, 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. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.

I was always my own teacher.

Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.

The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.