I work until beer o'clock.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.

Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil's there, too-everyone says so-but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be you know.

Little kids' minds are very, very strong. They bend. There's a lot of tensile strength and they don't break. We start our kids off on things like "Hansel and Gretel," which features child abandonment, kidnapping, attempted murder, forcible detention, cannibalism, and finally murder by cremation. And the kids love it.

It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.