Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized people on the planet. You have to be. You’re doing the work and running your own business as well. It’s an incredibly organized state.[Also reading]…one of the things reading does do is discipline your mind. There are no writers who are not readers.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

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

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

when the universe exploded like a bomb, it started ticking like a bomb too. we know our sun will die, in another hundred million years or so, then the lights will go out and there will be no light to read by anymore.

I asked my mother why we couldn’t have books and she said, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.'I thought to myself, 'Too late for what?

At my most precarious, I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

Reading is a life-long collision with minds not like your own.