I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.