The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

We are the breakers of our own hearts

Insight doesn't happen often on the click of the moment, like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within.

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.