Kissing a witch is a perilous business. Everybody knows it’s ten times as dangerous as letting her touch your hand, or cut your hair, or steal your shoes. What simpler way is there than a kiss to give power a way into your heart?
The paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it’s killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.
I’m finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was.
Everyone’s got a different story.
I’m really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.
What writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I’m not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.
There’s not a thing wrong with you, you’re right the whole way through.
I look back one more time. It’s like a crater, a hole where something happened.
I guess the feminism in “Room” springs to mind most.
The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it’s going to be the next minute.
I think about Old Nick carrying me into the truck, I’m dizzy like I’m going to fall down. “Scared is what you’re feeling,” says Ma, “but brave is what you’re doing.” “Huh?” “Scaredybrave.” “Scave.” Word sandwiches always make her laugh but I wasn’t being funny.
I’ve certainly seen stats that if you have a woman director or a woman screenwriter, the number of female characters goes way up.
Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can’t. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what’s going to happen in each chapter and each scene.
I got in the habit of giving away a book as soon as I’ve finished it because I lived in a housing co-op at Cambridge and had no space to keep books.
A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.
I read three books a week.
I hate desks; they make me feel like a child doing homework.
Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.
And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.