As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.

The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must.

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

Explore me' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear...Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

There is no sense in loving someone you can never wake up to except by chance.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.