A lot of girls who turn into something remarkable start off as irrepressible, confident and a handful.

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.

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

But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I'd say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done half way, restrained or suppressed. There's nothing to correspond to say, the ironic, the cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response.

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

Fact-checking is so boring compared to writing fiction.

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.