What we need to wake people up to now is the crisis in imagination and concern for the greater good. We have no idea what the next ten years, much less the next fifty years, will demand of the coming generation. What we do know is that unless we have a people prepared and eager to meet those crises creatively and compassionately, there is not much hope for this poor old planet of ours.

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

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

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

Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.