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.

I spend a lot of time parenting because I'm home. A friend of mine told me that the average father sees each kid an average of twenty-two minutes a week, which I found almost unbelievable. Mine are in my hip pocket all the time. And I like it that way.

It's not the pain I'm afraid of; I know about the pain. What I'm afraid of is the end of this small, sweet dream.

The great thing about writing is that...you can do all these antisocial things and you get paid for them and nobody ever arrests you because they're all make-believe. Then that way if you were actually ever driven to do any of those things, the pressure's off because you'd have already written them down. It's therapy.

What's been tried once had been tried once before... and before... and before...

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.