You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business.

Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.

I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do.

Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.

The boy had the towering arrogance only seen in the greatest of artists and all nine-year-old boys.

Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.