But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don't take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.

Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

Rationally speaking, blaming one's behavior on alcohol or drugs is like blaming the ladder by which you descended into a pit, or the staircase that took you down to a cellar, for what you found there.

That's emails for ya: sometimes they're like an arrow that hits so deep in the target, you can't pull it out.

No one needs a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses.

Recasting fairy tales has become a publishing sub-genre in itself, and has been done both well and to the point of entropy. More interesting are those works where the structures of fairytales are abandoned but the world of 'fairy' is imported as a delicate spice.