She fell asleep, leaning on his chest, and he edged her a little off a particularly painful bruise, leaned his head back against the tree he had propped them up against, and closed his own eyes.

If you try to breathe water, you will not turn into a fish, you will drown; but water is still good to drink.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

One keeps searching for ease, she did not say, and not finding it, till the memories of no-pain seem only like daydreams.

Cigars should be like onions," she said, unfastening the catch and pushing back the pane. "Either the whole company does, or the whole company does not.

Betrayal would be a different sort of sick.

the touch of evil poisons by the idea of it. Reject the idea, and you've rejected the evil