Traditionally, the love of reading has been born and nurtured in high school English class

We never believe we're beautiful, no matter how many times we hear it. We never believe it until someone says it in the right way.

I know a lot of Eastern Europeans, and because of what they have been through and what they have seen, they have an attitude where they are not easily fooled.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another.

Reading was like eating alone, with that same element of bingeing.

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.

With this recitation of paraphernalia and detritus, O'Brien manages to encapsulate the experience of an army and of a particular war, of a mined and booby-trapped landscape, of cold nights and hot days, of soaking monsoons and rice paddies, and of the possibility of being shot, like Ted Lavender, suddenly and out of nowhere: not only in the middle of a sentence but in the midst of a subordinate clause.