He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

I love writing in longhand. Writing in longhand, I think, is a marvelous thing to do for a writer these days. If you have a notebook and a nice pen you can go off somewhere, you can write that's solar powered. You can drop it or get it wet and pretty much all of your work will continue to be there. If you suddenly decide to look up a word or check a reference you will not look up four hours later, blinking, finding yourself somehow in the middle of an Ebay auction you never had any plans to be part of.

When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

I knew enough about adults to know that if did tell them what had happened, I would not be believed. Adults rarely seemed to believe me when I told the truth anyway.

For me, I would rather read a good book, from a contented author. I don't really care what it takes to produce that.