What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?

I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances.

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.

I have a head for heights it's true, but no stomach for the depths. Strange then to have plumbed so many.

We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then. If we make anything that lasts, it outlives us, and it outlives its personal moment. All of my work is deep-dug from me, and every book has to stand or fall without me.

What a strange world this is when you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo.