"

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

"

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

"

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.

"

I believe in communication books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

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

"

To say exactly what one means, even to one's own private satisfaction, is difficult. To say exactly what one means and to involve another person is ha...more

"

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

"

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