Ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

Whenever people eat or drink together, it's communion.

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.

The novels we read allow us to encounter possible persons, visions of ourselves that we would never see, never permit ourselves to become, in places we can never go and might not care to, while assuring that we get to return home again.

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

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