August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don't you? 92 degrees even in the shade.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

My characters are always on the outside; the spotlight's not on them. But they do get somewhere.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent.

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.