I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

You are dead- what am I speaking to?

I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do. When I tell the story of Cinderella, the sprite does not want me to make it into an allegory of the fall of communism. The sprite would be unhappy if I did that.

There are some who live by every rule and cling tightly to their rectitude because they fear being swept away by a tempest of passion, and there are others who cling to the rules because they fear that there is no passion there at all, and that if they let go they would simply remain where they are, foolish and unmoved; and they could bear that least of all. Living a life of iron control lets them pretend to themselves that only by the mightiest effort of will can they hold great passions at bay.

Everything means something.

Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.