About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

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

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.