"I know that what your city has done in the war that is past, it shall do again in the war that has already arrived an…"

"that he cares for nothing except what might commend itself to a virtuoso Pagan, and thinks only as men thought before…"

"... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could …"

"cultivated the role of and/or witch, and — in the (1979) — rewrote the with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue…"

"My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a pries…"

"Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the , …"

"... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply a…"

"life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable."

"The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He …"

"All my novels are about moral questions ... Most of us want to believe in something: politics, religion, saving the w…"