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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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It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve...more

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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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The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new ...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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your morse code interferes with my heart beat. I had a steady heart before you, I replied upon it, it had seen active service and grown strong. Now yo...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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Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

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There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it. All stories end like that.

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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