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

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.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

Nonfiction brought me back to earth and sobered me up whenever it seemed like I'd become too drunk on the lives and loves of imaginary people, but that doesn't mean it was any less thrilling or transporting, although it was often more illuminating.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

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?