I was never a man of great ambition I cried too easily I didn't have a head for science Words often failed me While others prayed I only moved my lips

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

...The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.