“She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.”

“There's a word for a writer who never gives up: published.”

“I'm looking for a writer who doesn't know where the sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love, a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones who know her so well, the ones with the power to accuse and condemn in the blink of an eye. It's all right that she doesn't know what she's thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she's arrived.”

“If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.”

“Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell .Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.”

“To be a writer, you must write. To be a published writer you must finish what you write and then get what you've written in front of the outside world.”