She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.

As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters.

Any way, death is so final, isn't it? "Is it?" asked Richard. "Sometimes," said the marquis de Carabas. And they went down.

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.

The imagination and the place that dreams come from is so huge and so important. I'm trying to write about the real world, in that I'm trying to write about whatever it is the experience that makes us human, the things that we have in common.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.