A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?