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

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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

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Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

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Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, ...more

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In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn't change half way through a sentence like people...more

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Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be fou...more

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Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently

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The wider we read the freer we become.

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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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The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like...more