Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing.

It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind.

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.