I picked up the rule and started studying it hard, reading it over and over. It says that 20 percent of the volume of the boat can be appendages, and that's where the idea came from.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

In a polite age almost every person becomes a reader, and receives more instruction from the Press than the Pulpit.

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.

At the same time we were working on the structure so that it was a rigid piece and it was never touching the hull.