“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.”

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”

“From my point of view, what’s beautiful in the sport is something you don’t need to know too much about tactics or anything to see. If you find something beautiful, you don’t need to be an expert to know it. It’s like ballet.”

“I realise there's something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they're experts at letting things go.”

“When you are free of the world, you can do something about it. As long as you are a prisoner of it, you are helpless to change it. On the contrary, whatever you do will aggravate the situation.”

“The first thing that begins to happen when you begin taking yourself seriously as a writer is this imaginary writer’s block that people talk about, but I never really suffered from. But there’s this barrier between the spoken word and the written word, once you set something down in writing it’s supposed to be set in stone or you take on this funny attitude that writing is unnatural…”

“It doesn't matter what you do… so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.”

“You are in a prison with no bars. I worry about you.”

“You can’t undo something that’s happened; you can’t take back a word that’s already been said out loud.”

“While the spoken word can travel faster, you can’t take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.”