“It's always been difficult for me to speak and express my innermost thoughts. I prefer to write. When I sit down and write, words grow very docile, they come and feed out of my hand like little birds, and I can do almost what I want with them; whereas when I try to marshal them in open air, they fly away from me.”

“I got words in me, Jess, fighting to find a way out. Sometimes there's so many words and they get so crowded in my skull I think my head is gonna explode. I want to write them down. I've tried, but most of the time my thoughts and my feelings are bigger than what I can get on paper.”

“Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. 'Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it's written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.”

“It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.”

“So, tell me what my fists keep writing, my fingers, they open up like gates when I write...”

“She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.”