I myself discovered many authors through school reading lists and through school anthologies. The positives are: young readers can find the world opening up to them through books they study. The negatives may include bad experiences kids have - if they don't like the book or the teacher, or the way the book is taught.

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Science is not something that exists apart from human beings. It's one of the things we do as human beings, and we always have done science and technology in some form.

I'm the only person you've ever met who has read Longfellow.