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I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

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Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through....more

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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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Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. I...more

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The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thou...more

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Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under it...more

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A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

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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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So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irr...more

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Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for ...more

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I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was diff

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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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I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The ru...more

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I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I started to cry.(…)The unfam...more

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[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.