I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place you go, like going on holiday, and it can be somewhere that, while you’ve escaped, actually teaches you things you need to know when you go back, that gives you knowledge and armour and tools to change the bad place you were in. So no, they’re not escapist. They’re escape.

Stories are in one way or another mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in darkness.

People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and hanged those they saw as witches, the devil's servants: the wise women and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the strange

Style is made up of whatever an author can't avoid doing.

According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it.

Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.