Don't give anybody up." He stroked her. "Or leave anybody out. Me and you both left her out today, and I'm ashamed for us." "There just wasn't room in today for it ... He said, "There's room for everything, and time for everybody, if you take your day the way it comes along and try not to be much later than you can help."

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.