You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.

We humans have had from time unknown the compulsion to name things and thus to be able to deal with them. The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. And in ancient thought the name itself has power, so that to know someone's name is to have a certain power over him. And in some societies, as you know, there was a public name and a real or secret name, which would not be revealed to others.

February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

Trouble can always be borne when it is shared.

We book people are always preaching about reading aloud to children, but unless you do, you can't realize how it enriches family life.