Know, my son, that the enemy will always be with you. He will be in the shadow of your dreams and in your living flesh, for he is the other part of yourself. There will be times when he will surround...
If we do not laugh, we will cry. Crying will only make us hotter and sweatier. We Jews like to joke about death because what you laugh at and make familiar can no longer frighten you. Besides, Chayale...
Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that som...
It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.
I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the f...
In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writ...
Time may heal all wounds, but it does not erase the scars.
Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.
We are all monsters Hannah said. Because we are letting it happen. She said it not as if she believed it but as she were to repeat something she had heard before.
Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, Let your characters grow. Up. And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom....
But wanting and getting are hard neighbors and bitter friends.
After a while, the story becomes the truth because no one actually remembers how things really happened.
To eat away that hope. Belief, Mama often said, is the first thing to come, and the last thing to go. Belief, Papa always countered, is for children.
What makes a good book?
Papa wasn't like them, with lines like cursive writing up and down their faces.
Their lips were too thin to ask forgiveness, and their minds too mean to understand love.
1. Write every day2. Write what interests you.3. Write for the child inside of you. (Or the adult, if you are writing adult books.)4. Write with honest emotion5. Be careful of being facile6. Be wary o...
The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.
She’s gone on that long road into adulthood from which none of us returns.