Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.

Without intent all painting is meaningless.

I want to be good at what I do, obviously, and to do that I need to keep my head straight.

The sea is whipping the skyThe sky is whipping the seaYou can hide away forever from the stormBut you'll never hide away from me.

George Washington was the president who could never tell a lie, and Richard Nixon was the president who could never tell the truth. Donald Trump is truly the president who can't tell the difference.

In other localities certain places in the streams are much better than others, but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere.

I loved doing Supergirl, but I would love to do Batgirl. I would absolutely love to do a live-action Batgirl!

All my life I have been intensely repelled by the idea of 'making an effort'. I hate this idea today as much as I did as a child. I don't know why I hate it so much; I just do.

There is an objective reality in which my body and mind are one. But I am not here and never have been.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.