Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.

A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.

In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I'd never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that's when I started to fall in love with dance.

When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.