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

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

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

That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.

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.

...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.

Trouble can always be borne when it is shared.