“You are a writer bleeding words onto a page. And the ones who hate you will trample on that page. And the ones who love you will cut you, to keep you bleeding.”

If a boy ever says, you remind me of someone–don’t fall in love with him. You will never be anything more than second best.

A book travels for days, for years, sometimes for centuries to meet you at an exact point in time.

There are things I miss that I shouldn’t, and things I don’t that I should. Sometimes we want what we couldn’t, sometimes we love what we could.

One day you meet someone and for some inexplicable reason, you feel more connected to this stranger than anyone else.

I love you, I do – you have my word. You have all my words.

You know, missing someone can sometimes be the best thing for a writer.

Do you remember the song that was playing the night we met? No, but I remember every song I have heard since you left.

Before I fell in live with words, with setting skies and singing birds – it was you I fell in love with first.

Your first love isn’t the first person you give your heart to- it’s the first one who breaks it.

Strange how it mattered so much, when now it matters so little.

Like time suspended, a wound unmended – you and I. We had no ending, no said goodbye; For all my life, I’ll wonder why.

I was there in your forgetting, until I was forgot.

For she is his poet, and he is her poetry.

She was the book that was not written. The sentence that was not scripted. She was the word you wished you could have said.

Knowing sleep will set it right – if you were not to wake.

Hands are no longer hands. They are caresses. Mouths are no longer mouths. They are kisses. My name is no longer a name, it is a call. And love is no longer love – love is you.

You’re trying to take something that can be described in many, many sentences and pages of prose, but you can convert it into a couple lines of poetry and you still get the essence, so it’s that compression. The best code is poetry.

Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

Religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.

Playing Paige, I felt I had to train to wrestle.

I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.

At every hour of every day, I can tell you on which page of which book each school child in Italy is studying.

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music.