I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks.

Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.

I think most things are pretty magical, and that it's less a matter of belief than it is one of just stopping to notice.

When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.

Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.