“Does he behave in rude or improper ways?""He's a Bowman. We don't know any better.”

“Knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile the fight.”

“Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows; in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come by in any other way.”

“Tell me, is he always really rude, or does he save that for mundanes?”

“In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.'I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.”

“You're the woman in my life,” he said. “Another thing about me and my brothers? We look after the women in our lives. We don't know any other way.”