I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

The blood in my veins is frozen but it sings of love.

I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts.

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead.

That's emails for ya: sometimes they're like an arrow that hits so deep in the target, you can't pull it out.

George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.