But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you..

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone..

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and ….

Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times..

Without the past to cast its long shadow, might you see the future more clearly?.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic..

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth..

Of course I loved books more than people..

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white….

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living..

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story..

I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something tha….

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that i….

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning ….

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere..

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner..

Reading can be dangerous..

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is t….

There was no single moment when I thought, Aha! What a great idea! Rather there was a slow and gradual accumulation of numerous small ideas..

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I ….