“What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.”

“We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”

“You will no longer pick this sage that flavors your whole life.”

“What do I love most? Working with words. Words in a sentence are like pieces of a puzzle; you try out a whole bunch, then turn them this way and that until they fit into the whole. Creating flow is crucial. There's nothing like the moment when, after working and reworking a sentence, everything falls into place, and you know that it's right. What I do love least? Touring. It's grueling, time-consuming, and lonely.”

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

“I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.”