“But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.”

“It's only a story.' As if such words made it less real. But I did not believe him even then, for stories were written down, and the words on the page were proof enough. Fixed and permanent in time, the words, if anything, made the people and places more real than the everchanging world.”

“Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.”

“As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.”

“I have never written a novel yet...without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.”

“Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.”