Books were safer than other people anyway.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

When I was a kid and a young man I read everything. When I was about 23, I was incredibly lucky in that I wound up with several book review columns, which meant that I had to read huge amounts of stuff that was outside my experience and outside my comfort zone. I think every young writer should be forced to read the kind of stuff they would not normally read for pleasure.

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

I thought I was your destination. Looks like I was just another stop on the line.