“It is the tale, not he who tells it.”

“The tales we tell ourselves about ourselves makes us who we are.”

“Quitoon knew the world well. It wasn't jut Humankind and its works he knew, but all manner of things without any clear connection between them. He knew about spices, parliaments, salamanders, lullabies, curses, forms of discourse and disease; of riddles, chains, and sanities; ways to make sweetmeats, love and widows; tales to tell children, tales to tell their parents, tales to tell yourself on days when everything you know means nothing.”

“Who says happy endings are only in fairy tales? Pray, believe and wait patiently on God and He will make a fairy tale out of you”

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.”