“I huff and puff and struggle with every sentence, paragraph and page – sometimes every word as well.”

Doing anything when you’re bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored.

Yet, isn’t it strange, isn’t it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is!

There are times when you don’t know yourself. There are times when you don’t want to know yourself.

He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.

The thing is, when love is real, whether it’s ebbing or flowing, it’s always there, it never goes away. And that’s the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy

As someone who knows her mind and who I envy for that. As someone who is strong in herself without seeming to need anyone else to help her. As someone who makes me thinks and unsettles me in a way that makes me feel more alive.

I will not compromise on language or content. At 15, people can handle the same language as me, they’re just as complicated as me and are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time.

Readers are made by readers – it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?

Never give it all. You can never be yourself otherwise.

The pleasure of being bored ismooning about and doing nothing.

The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself

And the price for being a homo-hater should be as high as anyone can pay.

The most memorable people in life will be the friends who loved you when you weren’t very lovable.

Self pity is a disease which does not kill but corrodes.

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

Tweets are published in less than a second, Safari pages load in less than three seconds.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

The experience of reading a comic should not be the time it takes to turn each page.

I could write pages of poetry about you. And yet words never seem to say enough.

You try not to because it’s hard and at times shameful, but then when you read those pages over and you see they have no life to them so you throw them away and force yourself to be more honest.

I had a financial page to write in the Mail on Sunday where Id give tips on shares. I worked there for two and a half years. Nothing compares to the burst of energy felt on a newsroom floor when a big story breaks.

For me, the beauty of the blank page, or empty screen,staring up at nine thirty after two cups of coffee and a deep breath remains unique.

When he is wounded, I bleed. {page 262 of John Adams}