“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”

“Writing is more about discovery than invention.”

“One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.”

“...when people are expecting to see nothing that is usually what they see.”

“When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”

“One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”

“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes -- characters even -- caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.”