I'm always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

I have no idea what happens next.

Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.