“The story is not in the plot but in the telling.”

My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.

As men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation – you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality.

Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination.

The presence of the trees was very strong…The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.

To hear, one must be silent.

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things.

Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison.

We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

What is life without incompatible realities?

The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Keith Richards outlived Jim Fixx, the runner and health-nut dude. The plot thickens.

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It’s hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff – so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

“Novels and gardens,” she says. “I like to move from plot to plot.”

The CIA has a plot…they’ve used before to get rid of world leaders. Only problem…is convincing Hussein…to fly to Dallas.

Harry Potter’ shouldn’t be children’s first experience with suspense and plot turns.

The cliches are that it’s the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.

There are those who maintain that in this world women have no right to interfere in the affairs of state, in politics, in plots and counter-plots.

Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.