We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Even things which seem separate and finished are infinitely connected and will infinitely connect. This connection happens as soon as you let it, as soon as you engage - as soon as you even attempt to engage.

I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.

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.

Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.

Do you come to art to be comforted, or do you come to art to be re-skinned?

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.