The complicated futility of ignorance.

Anyway -- because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next -- and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis -- at any time of night or day.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

"Self-taught, are you?" Julian Castle asked Newt. "Isn't everybody?" Newt inquired. "Very good answer." Castle was respectful.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.