I always wondered why the makers leave housekeeping and cooking out of their tales. Isn't it what all the great wars and battles are fought for -- so that at day's end a family may eat together in a peaceful house?

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

Much arrogance is necessary equipment for an artist, I think. Not sufficient, but necessary. It carries one across the gaps.

Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

Sometimes you must go against the wheel's turn.

The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.