“Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.”

“The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed - the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a library is divided - constantly modify one another in ways that appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion.”

“I am often asked why I use a variety of pen names. The answer is that this way readers always know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my books.”

“Nico: "Prodigium effodio" -- what does that mean again?Vision: Excavating monster. It's Latin.Nico: Damn, how much time did you spend in the library?Vision: I am a library.”

“. . . Liesl & Po is the embodiment of what writing has always been for me at its purest and most basic - not a paycheck, certainly; not an idea, even; and not an escape. Actually, it is the opposite of an escape; it is a way back in, a way to enter and make sense of a world that occasionally seems harsh and terrible and mystifying, And, of course, it is a way of finding a happy ending - even, or especially, when the happy ending is denied me in real life. Let it be an escape for its readers. For me, it is a way of not letting go.”

“If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.”