The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [...] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

There is a perfect someone, even if the road to that someone isn’t all that perfect.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

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?

We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it-passion-is one of those things that you have an endless amount of-like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.