The fact is that every atom that we're made of is part of that first explosion of a nuclear star billions of years ago. We're connected to the entire universe.

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

Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be.

Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells.

The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.

I learned capacity for self-reflection very early, finding it through interior monologues that books are so good at and that visual media is so bad at because it's so boring - nothing's happening. In a book, you can be inside the narrator's head for 50 pages, and nothing needs to happen. Then you learn to be inside your own head without something needing to happen. It's a very good antidote to a crazy, restless, "what's next?" culture - that you can just be in your own head and nothing is happening except that this is a rich place. I love that.