I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.

a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.

It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.