One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

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.