Danger is to adventure what garlic is to spaghetti sauce. Without it, you just end up with stewed tomatoes.

People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve. (Bernard Mickey Wrangle, p 99)

Often, moreover, it is...that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable, that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.

In fiction, when you paint yourself into a corner, you can write a pair of suction cups onto the bottoms of your shoes and walk up the wall and out the skylight and see the sun breaking through the clouds. In nonfiction, you don't have that luxury.

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

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere - the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial.