You don’t learn about yourself by being alone, you learn about yourself from other people.

I'm now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, "There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres." I'm much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it's doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

Being a hero, the man had observed, is largely a matter of knowing one’s cues.

I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

Young minds - young brains - need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I disagree with. Or they'll never be able to figure out what ideas they believe in.