A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.

You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.