After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics,...

the romance of solitude and small places, the blurring of identity.

There is no ME without books; they’re everything I remember from childhood, from maturity … All that’s happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading.

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.