Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)