Quotes About Author

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

And it's a cold place the world, especially when warmed by arsen.

I've told you before, I don't comprehend religion, although conviction is a concept I'm beginning to get. In any case, someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up.

The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible.

When goodness removes itself, the space it occupies corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies.

Don't fasten on Dorothy. Only unanswerable longing lies down that road. Gone is gone.

People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us." He sighed. "It's people who claim that they're good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.

I rarely trust myself to make statements about truth.

But he loved the contrapuntality of discussion even before he quite understood that words possessed dedicated meanings.

I'm the very glass of fashion and the mold of form. Aren't I, Mewster? You look like a walking hairball, said the kitten.

A few trinkets for my sister," she said. "She's like Miss Galinda, she loves the fancy outside of things.

Well, that's not poetry, that's propaganda, and not even good propaganda at that.

Alice less winsome than weird, and treated Lydia like a Cerberus

So Elena goes out. Can you see her? Over there, on the path by the fence made of wire and disoriented wooden rails. Now in the shadows of the juniper, now coming into the light. There.

Let me be the first to welcome you to Shiz, Glinda. This is your first year? Please, it is Galinda. The proper old Gigllikinese pronunciation, if you don't mind.

And when the good Doctor is finished ferreting out the difference between Animals and people, I will propose he apply the same arguments to the differences between the sexes, said Elphaba.

The premise is prejudicial and proves that what's wanted here isn't a trial but a conviction.

The chronic fun of writing, the distraction of it, was not knowing.

Boq sat down, and shook his head, as if bewildered by the apparition of Elphaba.

A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence--easy to deride as mawkish and sentimental.

Understanding the Four Tendencies gives us a richer understanding of the world.

Lewis's brilliant essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children":

When we understand the Four Tendencies, we can set up situations to work better for everyone.

Research supports his observation: It's not goal attainment, but the process of striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.