I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned "Now I lay me" and the Lord's Prayer and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.

I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

When I was a child and the snow fell, my mother always rushed to the kitchen and made snow ice cream and divinity fudge-egg whites, sugar and pecans, mostly. It was a lark then and I always associate divinity fudge with snowstorms.

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

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