“OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.”

“This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next.”

“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.”

“I wanted to have a voice, and it was okay if I wasn't going to be so famous or so rich.”

“So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?”

“I read Wuthering Heights when I was seven. I stole a copy from the library. We weren’t allowed books in the house because they’re ‘dirty and dusty’. My mum had a shelf of fake leather books which my dad used to hide whisky behind. I used to die of embarrassment every time a visitor tried to pick up a book and realized it was fake.
The library was forbidden so it became exotic and sexy in my imagination. I was dying to get in there and read a book!”

“I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.”

“What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?”

“I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.”

“I've read a lot of books, so I know bunches of stuff that sounds like it could be true.”