The initial spark usually has something to do with panic -- I'm due to turn in a story to a workshop or an editor. It's a terrible working method.

You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.

Everyone knows that wizards are pigheaded and come to bad ends.

Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.

A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.

Look. All books are weird when you think about it.... It goes without saying that real life is also weird.

Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl.

Most of My Friends are two-thirds water

I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.

Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.

The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed and given to evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works too much, or it can be an alarm clock.

Let all thy joys be as the month of May.

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.

The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful—‘important’ if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and ‘serious’ expresses what I mean much better

I am not sending messages with my feet. All I ever wanted was not to come up empty. I did it for the dough and the old applause.

Men should be like Kleenex, soft, strong and disposable.

The brightest ornaments in the crown of the blessed in heaven are the sufferings which they have borne patiently on earth.

The world is to be cleaned by somebody, and you are not called of God if you are ashamed to scrub.

Cheer up: You're a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you're more loved than you ever dared hope.

Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

It's the people who are in the wrong who get angry.