“Sybil had an unreal, larger-than-life feeling... as if she were a person in a book.”

“My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.”

“She knew Pota had a larger respect for personal privacy than he did for God, Congress, or the U. S. Constitution and never looked at anything there except, occasionally, for the remote control to the television set.”

“… larger than life… I've never understood that expression. What's larger than life?”

“This book had two authors, and they were both the same person.”

“Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”

“Maybe all people with minds like Isaac's were the same. She knew he would make a much larger contribution than she ever would - he cared only about things much bigger than his own life. Ideas, truths, the reasons things were. As if he himself, his own existence, was somehow incidental.”

“A book had always been a door to another world… a world much more interesting and fantastical than reality. But she had finally discovered that life could be even more wonderful than fantasy.

And that love could fill the real world with magic.”

“Taking another life, she had whispered, even a guilty one, should never be easy. If it were, we'd be little more than animals.”

“She loved the smell of books, the feel of books, the look of them on the shelf.”