I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.

Don’t lie. You know you like to view but not to buy. I have found that I am not a space where people want to live, at least not without decorating first. And that is the stubbornness in me: I do not want to be someone’s little home.

In this life, you have to be your own hero.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.