I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money.

Belief in the supernatural or belief in wild talents like precognition and telepathy and telekinesis and things like that, it seems to me that belief in those things is just very, very freeing.

The world had moved on and all that was over, done before fairly begun.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

C-C-Can you get bones in your buh-buh-brain?' Bill asked. This was turning into the most interesting conversation he'd had in weeks.

Once I fell in love with books, I fell in love completely.