One of the great features of the BEA this year is that many of the major author events were livestreamed, so I was able to catch them at home instead of hightailing it into Manhattan in the wee morning hours. I was lucky enough to hear Junot Diaz, Barbara Kingsolver, Lois Lowry and a number of other highly regarded authors speak about their works and the craft of writing. Here are a few highlights I wanted to share with you:

Junot Diaz: “Seeing people wrestle with love is one of the oldest stories we have…” “Being in love is where we meet ourselves…we lay aside all those masks and make ourselves available to this tremendous gift.”

Barbara Kingsolver: “The nature of story has not changed in thousands of years….” “The novel, driven by character and by plot transports the reader into another human mind. Nothing else puts you on the inside of another mind — that’s our domain…this is the magical thing about writing we cannot replace….” “When I begin a novel, I’m always overwhelmed by the size of the current I step into — it’s all of human experience.”

John Green: “I believe that story trumps everything.” “Reading is quiet and contemplative and immersive…..that is the gift that both readers and writers can give us – the gift of escaping ourselves.” “Books will survive and grow in this media-drenched world.”

Lois Lowry: “They always tell you write what you know. I think it makes more sense to write what you don’t know — what makes you uneasy, what keeps you up at night…” “That’s what we do, those of us who write, we wrestle with human behavior — why we do what we do.” “Evil exists, it will always exist, and we will face it and fight it again and again…and it is the young who always come up and face it….” “The young believe they can change and fix the world.”