Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

There are not so many mythical creatures from Inkheart.

The sea always filled her with longing, though for what she was never sure.

believe me. Sometimes when life looks to be at its grimmest, there's a light hidden at the heart of things. Clive Barker, Abarat

Second, there are so many magical places in books that you cant go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.

A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.

You know what they say: When people start burning books they'll soon burn human beings.

Books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them.

I have two Iceland horses, a very hairy dog called Looney, and a guinea pig.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.

A good marriage is supposed to be one where each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal.

Some consider haters, people that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success. I just don’t consider them.

In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.

Call no man happy before he dies.

The Government of the United States possesses no power whatever over the question of religion.

Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than receiving an Oscar.

I have long since decided if you wait for the perfect time to write, you'll never write. There is no time that isn't flawed somehow.

Matter of fact, the interesting friendships are the ones that are divergent.

The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.

I don't want to see that two-tier Senegal, that two-tier Africa, when you have those at the top and those at the bottom, people who are hungry, people who do not have enough to eat.