“Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.”

“Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple - sensitively - with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer.”

“He taught me that language was rubbery, plastic. It wasn't, as I thought, something you just use, but something you can play with. Words were made up of little bits that could be shuffled, turned back to front, remixed. They could be tucked and folded into other words to produce unexpected things. It was like cookery, like alchemy. Language hid more than it revealed.”

“You do not win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making sure that some poor bastard dies for his.”

“He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.”

“Imagination is highly suspect. Reality is what is beautiful. But we are blind to it because it is familiar.”

“Freedom had no place in the Soviet System. Freedom was another word for anarchy, and that wouldn't do at all.”

“I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world's. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar”