The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

You are safe with me." "I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.

The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

Things are not what they seem.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.