The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.

anything that stretches the mind is a help to the potential author.

The truth is that I hate to think about other people reading my books," Miranda said. "It's like watching someone go through the box of private stuff that I keep under my bed.

Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.

We have much to be judged on when he comes, slums and battlefields and insane asylums, but these are the symptoms of our illness and the result of our failures in love.

I got so discouraged, I almost stopped writing. It was my 12-year-old son who changed my mind when he said to me, "Mother, you've been very cross and edgy with us and we notice you haven't been writing. We wish you'd go back to the typewriter. That did a lot of good for my false guilts about spending so much time writing. At that point, I acknowledged that I am a writer and even if I were never published again, that's what I am."

The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.