What you get is no longer what you see.

art happens. It happens when you have the craft and the vocation and are waiting for something else, something extra, or maybe not waiting; in any case it happens. It's the extra rabbit coming out of the hat, the one you didn't put there.

Somebody has been a complete ratbag all their life and they've gotten away with it, and they die happy and rich, we so much want to believe that they're going off to the halls of judgment, that their heart will be weighed against the feather of truth, that it will be heavy with sin and it will be eaten by a crocodile. It's almost essential to our well-being to have a fallback position like that. It may appear as if you've gotten away with it, but you'll pay for it later.

Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.