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.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off somewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority - of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too.

I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind.

What worries me is that a load of shite has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves.If you start taking books off shelves then you are only going to find what you are looking for, which does not help those who do not know what they are looking for.

جمع الكتب هو استحواذ، ومرض، وإدمان، وفتنة، وقدر. هو ليس بهواية. من يقوم بذلك فلأنه عليه القيام به. ومن لا يقوم بذلك، فيعتقد أنه شبيه بجمع الطوابع

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.