You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said, "I'm a writer," it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

I want to be bored. But I can't. But I really don't want to be this thing that I'm having to be instead of being bored.

There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in evrything, everywhere we look.

Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.