“I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.”

“There were lives in those books, and deaths. Families and friends and lovers and enemies. Joy and despair, jealousy, envy, madness, and rage. All there. I reached out and touched the cover of one called The Earth. I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.”

“In my head I hear a whisper, or rather the memory of a whisper. The familiar voice is soft, and it warms me from the inside out as it murmurs a name: Charlotte.”

“I thought I could hear movement in the kitchen, perhaps a voice murmuring, but it was a matter of urgency that I should get to sleep before two, the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me.”

“Out of silence I begin to hear the voices of characters whispering snippets of a story to me.”

“The great glory of travel, to me, is not just what I see that's new to me in countries visited, but that in almost every one of them I change from an outsider looking in to an insider looking out.”