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.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

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

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

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

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.