Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

I'm more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not.

You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.

An odd phrase, "by heart," he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

I do not want to be a relative and passive being, anywhere. I want to live and love and write.