Only a Working Title

"There is creative reading as well as creative writing."

"I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I’ve been at it pretty much 50 years, and I’m now beginning to learn how to do the job well."

"Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life."

"Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write."

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."

"Without character, you have nothing. Great plot? Robust storyworld? Potent themes? Elegant font? Matters little if your character is a dud. The punch might be delicious, but not if someone threw up in it. The character is why we come to the table. The character is our way through all those other things. We engage with stories because we relate to them: they are mirrors. Characters are the mirror-side version of “us” staring back. Twisted, warped, uncertain — but still us through and through."

"Children’s books change lives. Stories pour into the hearts of children and help make them what they become."

"When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness."

"You can’t ban a word, even a horrible one like “mong”. That’s just like saying “Let’s burn one book. Let’s just burn Mein Kampf; it’s a horrible book and nobody likes it”. At the point that you burn Mein Kampf, you’re a fucking fascist society! You’re not even a proper fascist society because you’ve burned the fucking guide book!"

"The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of linguistics, the workings of the human mind."

"Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives."

"Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated—as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture."