But I hope that in the lives of [the characters], you will find stories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart. That's the transaction that counts more than best-seller lists, royalty statements, awards, or reviews. Because in the pages of this book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and you will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a character that I control, but as a person with a mind of your own. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you can. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you can make it into a world worth living in.

A strange thing happened then. The speaker agreed with her that she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that h…

The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every book I write, however, is that I'll overreach myself once too often and try to write a story that …

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get i…

This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and audience. The 'true' story is not the one that exists in my mind; it is certainly not the writte…

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it becau…