“What art does is give us the refinement, all the shades of meaning, of emoting, that we dont have language for. What fascinates me about that is were talking about an art form in which your medium ...”

“The public library is where place and possibility meet.”

“Rather than feeling that every moment youve got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Writing is a struggle against silence.”

“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”

“People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links t...”