Extraits

We writers [...] have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were -- to understand that truth is not in what happens but in what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

in "Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading and Daydreaming"

There was a story I was told as a child, about a little girl who peeked in through a writer's window one night, and saw him writing. He had taken his false face off to write and had hung it behind the door, for he wrote with his real face on. And she saw him; and he saw her. And, from that day to this, nodoby has ever seen the little girl again.

in "These Are Not Our Faces"