... we read novels because they give us the comfortable sensation of living in worlds where the notion of truth is indisputable, while the actual world seems to be a more treacherous place.

So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.

And yet, in books were comfort and diversion; and they were wanted!

They provide relief. Sometimes, it’s the relief of the same genre as what we find in a church sanctuary when the minister ascends to the pulpit and late-morning sunlight is blasting through the windows behind him to gild him and the congregants before you as the choir reaches the climax of the doxology. Sometimes, it’s the relief of a kind yet somehow firm-and-gentle hand at the back of the neck, kneading away not sorrow but the loneliness that can attend it. Sometimes, it’s the relief of discovering you’re no longer bound by the laws of gravity and that, yes, you can actually fly. Sometimes, it’s an answer. Stories do all of these things for us. I’m convinced we’d be utterly lost without them.

Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety.

At any rate that afforded me some comfort.

Fairy tales--simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life.

Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality. I feel that all things float within the realm of the possible. As a reader I let myself be carried away by the enchantment of a story, without worrying too much about its authenticity. As a writer I abandon myself in the same way to the necessity of telling, convinced that if something is not exactly true at this moment, it may be so tomorrow. That's the way I have found it to be in my work.

Bookstores always remind me that there are good things in this world

I look to stories for consolation,the kind of small consolation that one needs to want to wake up everyday;as template for life;for news on how others live;for reminders that life's mysteries have no key

...these stories are a kind of beacon. By making stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world, these writers reassert the fact that we live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.

Macaulay is like a book in breeches...He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

[T]here must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientist, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.