I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.

In my dreams of this city I am always lost.

My brother and I were both teenage writers, and he was, I have to say, better than I was, but he went into science, and I went into writing.