For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

The past beats inside me like a second heart.