In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.

I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair.

And feeling clever, I've always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.

one could drown in irrelevance.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.