He glared at Lucian in the manner of birds, first peering through one eye and then turning his head to peer through the other, apparently finding both views equally loathsome.

This is overdue. Quite a bit, I'm afraid. I apologize. We moved to Topeka when I was very small, and Mother accidentally packed it up with the linens. I have traveled a long way to return it, and I...

Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality - for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic...

The two of them together in a place like Retribution Falls would result in alcoholic carnage, sure as bird shit on statues.

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

I, on the other hand, am very concerned about how word choice will affect my readers. For instance, in the description of Genesis, I chose the term 'good and evil' instead of 'right and wrong', which...

Instantly, the pair fell to groping one other as if each had puffed the magic dragon at a rock concert in Woodstock.

At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job - because all that one does in America is considered a "job" - with no clear...

Jack reads too many books. He thinks we're going to drive all year and have great adventures.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

One of the most difficult things when you are trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might...

Maybe there is no guile here," Deor suggested. "Perhaps it is just a group of dragons who have come together to raid the hold." "The difference? If they pretend to cooperate ... they must cooperate to...

Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

Oh, listen. Listen!' A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are {the geese}, a wavering V headed...

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper...

Anaemia is an illness primarily affecting characters in novels.

I tell him there'll be an army waiting for him, and your friend is only concerned with the color of their uniforms. What's this really about? Max shrugged. "A girl." I glared at Max. "Dude. Shut up."

As it happens I don't think it was God - the woman who saved me, she doesn't look like she's had much to do with angels, Perhaps the Devil was behind me all the time.

It's no disgrace to be black, but it's often very inconvenient.

Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.

Don't be a writer; it's a terrible way to live your life. There's nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you...

I don't so much hope that any reader "agrees" with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Wait -- let me back in!... Let me in! Let me in! Let me in! Wait -- let me back out!

A man is known by the books he reads.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to...

Everyone knew what he was thinking. Certainly there were demons in the world. But they were like Tehlu's angels. They were like heroes and kings. They belonged in stories. They belonged out there....

To be able to influence Tanzanian literature and African literature, and sell our books in Tanzania as well as in our continent, we need to be committed to what we do. And what we do is writing. Write...

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.