Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.

Reading. Reading was the stable backdrop against which my life was played.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.

Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless and refuse to do what people ask of you.

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

what I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.