I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing,...

The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all...

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman’s secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their...

Don’t you think it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?

That is what madness is, isn’t it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don’t make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it’s not a kind of sense anyone else can...

I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story.

Mama said, “Dreams are different to real life but important too.

Chicago has so much excellent architecture that they feel obliged to tear some of it down now and then and erect terrible buildings just to help us all appreciate the good stuff.

I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol...

To world enough and time.

You can still be cool when you’re dead. In fact, it’s much easier, because you aren’t getting old and fat and losing your hair.

I love you always. Time is nothing.

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

The only thing we can do is to say ‘Fuck it’ over and over again, really loud, until someone stops us.

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to...

I never understood why Clark Kent was so hell bent on keeping Lois Lane in the dark.

…all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath.

Think for a minute, darling: in fairy tales it’s always the children who have the fine adventures. The mothers have to stay at home and wait for the children to fly in the window.