"They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up."

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content."

"You write once and you can call yourself a writer, but it takes three novels before you can call yourself a novelist. The first two could have just been lucky. One day, I will finish my third, and one day, I will be a novelist."

"I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come.' Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out."

"He wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate."

"The first thing I tried to do in the months after losing my mother was to write a poem. I found myself turning to poetry in the way so many people do - to make sense of losses. And I wrote pretty bad poems about it. But it did feel that the poem was the only place that could hold this grief."

"Art shows us that human beings still matter in a world where money talks the loudest, where computers know everything about us, and where robots fabricate our next meal and also our ride there."