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

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

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

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

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?

Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.