“Think of the future, she whispers. Jumbled images in primary colours. White and red swastika flags waving in the wind; gleaming rockets flying into the air; skyscrapers rise above the Danube, the T...”

“Perhaps it is always summer, in the place where we are young.”

“Meeting ones heroes is always such a disappointment.”

“In the words he’s free, on the page he can be anything. A hero.”

“Meeting one’s heroes is always such a disappointment.”

“I built an idea in my head of the hero I wanted to be, a grab bag of traits from heroes, villains, and side characters. I did not have book role models, I had book blueprints.But there remained a h...”

“I am not always good and noble. I am the hero of this story, but I have my off moments.”

“Ethan: "You think I'm a hero?"Beth: "Yes."Ethan: "But lousy husband material?" Like that really mattered to him.Beth: "Don't sweat it. So was Superman.”

“In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write.”

“What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.”

“I'm pretty sure this is it for the teen movie thing. It's so frustrating to read when you get to page 20 and you're like, Oy! It's the same thing again!”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”