Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing, and life doesn't.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.

. . . I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories.
I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.