If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.

With all respects to heaven, I like it here.

We shape ourselves by our imaginative reach.

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.

Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.

Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.