For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written. ... She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up.

If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

When you learn to read you will be born again...and you will never be quite so alone again.

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

Drink very good tea out of a thin Wocester cup of colour between apricot and pink.

Wanting is the beginning of getting.

It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.

I don't know if I believe in God, but I know I believe in the devil. I have met him.

You can be a nuisance to your family. You mustn't be a nuisance to your friends.

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

I only accept your mistakes and flaws to the degree that I accept my own.

Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.

It is easiest to "be all things to all men," but it is not honest. Self-respect must be sacrificed every hour in the day.

Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.

The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.

It's my experience that the fluidity of sexuality with younger people is more accepted.

Every show I've ever, you know, produced, essentially it's the show I want to watch myself.

I have a very busy head. I have inside voices that I have learned to contain.

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.