There’s always someone who knows something.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.

...knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine.

you must not come lightly to the blank page.

American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar, but it has its own scruffy charm.