"We don't tend to write about disease in fiction - not just teen novels but all American novels - because it doesn't fit in with our idea of the heroic romantic epic. There is room only for sacrifice, heroism, war, politics and family struggle."

"He ran as fast as he could, but the memories were fast too. He stumbled upon them and fell to the ground. The memories got up and stared into his eyes menacingly, they laughed harder and kept their foot on his neck. He choked and fought to breathe. He tried and failed to scream. They choked him hard until he suffered and died miserably inside."

"A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is like to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, a poem permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves."

"I graduated from public high school. I went to the prom. I did it all. But I also worked on 30-million dollar movies with roller coasters and Michelle Pfeiffer. It's been a very interesting and blessed life for sure."

"I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is."