If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income.

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

Taking the things people do wrong seriously is part of taking them seriously. It’s part of letting their actions have weight. It’s part of letting their actions be actions rather than just indifferent shopping choices; of letting their lives tell a life-story, with consequences, and losses, and gains, rather than just be a flurry of events. It’s part of letting them be real enough to be worth loving, rather than just attractive or glamorous or pretty or charismatic or cool.