It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.

As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

The late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood.

By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. -- Ev Hillman

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

A lot of fairy tales are thinly disguised hostility raps against parents. Kids know that they can't make it on their own, that if they were left alone, they would die.