When someone tells me they didn't enjoy a book that I love:

Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

Maybe the mountain air got to my head, but in the land of Amazon poets and storytellers were kings and queens.

Syllables! Syllables! My heart is in my mouth, I put her foot in my mouth, my mouth was stopped, not that this settled anything. To be human is a syndrome And no marker, no, not my tongue can wag that not-dog Contraption, The homeless arm drags, Eye wanders from its orbit. I lie in bed amidst the trickles, my candle blows out, Tissue thickens and deposits they compress, they seem no Longer mobile, the be- Longing slips away, The lung congests, say ah, What memory, what gives? It is the bat slips its fur. The flying worm slips its skin. The angel sheds its light, it is a baby Balanced on the pan against the folds and corrugations, Holding up A pink pointed shoe, priapic but a sheath for my eye.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

From then on, Matilda would visit the library only once a week in order to take out new books and return the old ones. Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her. She was not quite tall enough to reach things around in the kitchen, but she kept a small box in the outhouse which she brought in and stood on in order to get whatever she wanted. Mostly it was hot chocolate she made, warming the milk in a saucepan on the stove before mixing it. Occasionally she made Bovril or Ovaltine. It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.