If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.

Human beings do not relate to written words in the same way that they will relate to spoken words. They do not relate to music in the same way that they do to pictures. It's all different parts of our head, different parts of our minds processing this.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

I was a book-y child. I was much more book-y than dark.

I loved the fact that I was suddenly no longer dependent on whether a store took out an ad in the right place, or on the word on the street.

However you must have sensed a lurking 'but' skulking beneath my happy, blithe, and chipper exterior. A minuscule vexation, like the teeniest lump of raw liver sticking to the inside of my boot.