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

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Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can't. Reading...more

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Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

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Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

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The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.

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People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart...more

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Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must ...more

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It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So...more

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I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that wri...more

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It could be that this record set before you now is a fiction.

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Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six ...more

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Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

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The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

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The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

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What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books bei...more