was there a store somewhere full of unwanted secrets?

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!

Popular versus literary—a false divide?

All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.

Oh, man, ‘the nursery, ’ ” Dominic said, “what a hell-hole. If I had kids I’d give them the nicest room in the house.”“You do have kids, ” his kid said.“Oh, yeah, well, right, you know what I mean.

If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around in the foothills of Olympus.

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.

Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.

God is a book I can no longer read.

The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story

In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.

Me and Call have always liked to get where we started for, even if it don't make a damn bit of sense.

Put something new on the table and everyone wants a piece of it.

There is a crisis of leadership and governance in Africa, and we must face it.

School plays are fine. Theater in school is fine.

Boredom makes you do crazy things

Let us treat them [children], therefore, with all the kindness which we would wish to help to develop in them.

Happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen.