Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.

Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big dark eyeglasses!

I don't have a problem with many uses of the word genre, just certain ones. I have the most trouble when these labels are used to prevent discussion, to prevent a work from being taken seriously as literature. When we say "genre," we generally mean "something crappy," something that would be sold in an airport.

I'm never going to be a Tom Clancy. And I wouldn't really want to be - not that I have anything against him, and I wish him continued success - because that's not why I'm writing novels. I'm doing it because I have to. I feel like I have to, anyway.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.

Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.