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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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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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Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

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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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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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Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

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I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British wr...more

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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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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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The words come at my call but who calls whom?

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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