Faites de beaux rêves, monsieur," she called as she put out the light. Switters had always loved that expression, "Make fine dreams." In contrast to the English, "Have sweet dreams," the French implied that the sleeper was not a passive spectator, a captive audience, but had some control over and must accept some responsiblity for his or her dreaming. Moreover, a "fine" dream had much wider connotations than a "sweet" one.

We're our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years.

Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.

Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it.

I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it.