Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it.

I'm not a writer because I want to make money. I'm a writer because I'm a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.

I had really tried to do everything else but [revisit Oz]. Partly because I knew there would be some amongst us who would say, 'Oh, he's just trying to milk that cow.' . . . . But in the end, I had an idea I couldn't get rid of. I couldn't get it out of my room.

Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.