“A novel seemed the easiest way to get what I had had in my head into the inside of other people's heads. Books are good that way.”

“It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.”

“Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.”

“In Charles Dickens's books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.”

“I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.”

“I had to drop my head back to meet his eyes, and the way he said my name--it was the same reverence people used in their prayers to Janan.”