No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

Believe it or not, friendships are difficult to write in fiction. They can easily come across as forced, particularly if they involve too much explication and too many overt gestures of affection.

None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions! A mantle of marble hiding a crumbling core of sandstone. See how they stare at me, wondering, all wondering, at my secret wellspring of wisdom...' Let's kill him,' Crokus muttered, 'if only to put him out of our misery.

It is an extraordinary act of courage,' said Tulas Shorn, 'to come to know a stranger's pain.

Fear bespeaks of wisdom. Recognition of responsibility.

We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the wold. It must be given freely. In abundance.