“I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.”

“I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”

“Until I dicover the meaning of this sentence, I will neither eat nor sleep."My dear uncle-" I began."Nor you either," he added.”

“I'd used the word "beautiful" to describe another boy. I knew how it must have sounded to her. I also knew that it was exactly what I'd meant, exactly what I did not want to mean.”

“Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.”

“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”