Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

Don't wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.

When it's over, we may feel wooed, adored, appreciated, or abused, but it will have been an affair to remember.

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things-flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

Never feel dumb. Not knowing who or what is no sin. Ignorance is simply the measure of what you haven't got to yet. I find writers and works every day that I haven't got to, haven't even heard of.

A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken."