A Book's Flaws Make It Less Predictable.

I Nodded. A Man's World. But What Did It Mean? That Men Whistled And Stared And Yelled Things At You, And You Had To Take It, Or You Get Raped Or Beat Up? A Man's World Meant Places Men Could Go But Not Women. It Meant They Had More Money,and Didn't Have Kids, Not The Way Women Did, To Look After Every Second. And It Meant That Women Loved Them More Than They Loved The Women, That They Could Want Something With All Their Hearts, And Then Not.

Beauty Was Empty As A Gourd, Vain As A Parakeet. But It Had Power. It Smelled Of Musk And Oranges And Made You Close Your Eyes In A Prayer.

My Father Was An Engineer - He Wasn't Literary, Not A Writer Or A Journalist, But He Was One Of The World's Great Readers. Every Two Weeks, He'd Take Me To Our Local Branch Library And Pull Books Off The Shelf For Me, Stacking Them Up In My Arms - 'have You Read This? And This? And This?"

Life Should Always Be Like This. ... Like Lingering Over A Good Meal.

The Writer Is Both A Sadist And A Masochist. We Create People We Love, And Then We Torture Them. The More We Love Them, And The More Cleverly We Torture Them Along The Lines Of Their Greatest Vulnerability And Fear, The Better The Story. Sometimes We Try To Protect Them From Getting Booboos That Are Too Big. Don’t. This Is Your Protagonist, Not Your Kid.