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Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

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He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

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Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physic...more

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It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in o...more

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Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

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A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

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Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of th...more

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I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesit...more

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I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality make...more

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The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of ...more