Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.

It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.