Cornelia Funke

So what? All writers are lunatics!

Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.

Nothing is more terrifying than fearlessness.

Books are like flypaper, memories cling to the printed pages better than anything else.

So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass pictures, tickling the skin. Even when Meggie nodded off she could still hear them, although Mo had closed the book long ago. Words that explained the world to her, its dark side and its light side, words that built a wall to keep out bad dreams. And not a single bad dream came over that wall for the rest of the night.

Weren__ all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!

It [the book] was spinning a magic spell around her heart, sticky as a spider's web and enchantingly beautiful..

There was another reason [she] took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends -- daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored.

It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?" Mo had said..."As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells...and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower...both strange and familiar.

The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness - and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly.

This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words! You can find friends between the pages of a book, wonderful friends.

If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper__emories cling to the printed page better than anything else.

Stories never really end...even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.

Dustfinger inspected his reddened fingers and felt the taut skin. __e might tell me how my story ends,_ he murmured. Meggie looked at him in astonishment. __ou mean you don__ know?_ Dustfinger smiled. Meggie still didn__ particularly like his smile. It seemed to appear only to hide something else. __hat__ so unusual about that, princess?_ he asked quietly. __o you know how your story ends?_ Meggie had no answer for that.

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.

As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

Read _ and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.