A quote from "The Bowl is Already Broken" by Mary Kay Zuravleff: "She'd never make it as a mystic. She had too many errands."

Michael Cunningham: "I think of Walt Whitman as the last unstupid optimist, the last undeluded optimist ... He was our Rumi, our whirling dervish."

Margaret Atwood on literary writers taking on speculative fiction: "We can do it. It's not talking squids on Planet X."

Cunningham: "I count among my influences Flaubert, Chekhov and 'Robot vs. the Aztec mummy.'"

Paul Auster: "It's a fundamental fact of life that stories create the world. There's no way to organize reality other than the story ... It's not that it saves us -- it is us."

Ian McEwan: "Behind the novel lies gossip. Gossip is the key to everything else ... It's a natural human thing to want to talk about the people around you and we use fiction to do it."

Auster: "People are as hungry as ever for stories, whether it's on TV or in the movies or in comic books or just sitting around the dinner table talking. That's why literature is never going to stop. It's as natural to human beings as eating or breathing."

Siri Hustvedt: "Being mentally ill does not make you stupid. Condescension is like a bad smell in the room."

Hustvedt: "Every fiction writer hears voices. Writing dialogue is the strangest thing in the world." A novel is "like remembering something that never happened."

James Tate: "I shall never again think of poetry readings as anything but pop-ups."

Atwood: "I'm a reading addict so I will read anything. I will actually read airplane magazines."

Atwood on why reading the Bible in school can be a good thing: "It makes you realize that some people who are purporting to uphold it haven't actually read it."

Atwood on why she reads the Bible in hotel rooms rather than watch TV: "First of all, the stories are better and second, it's more violent."