Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

Keep your dreams, you never know when you might need them.

But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died... or worse.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.