Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.

With every step I took away from her, the movement at my heart and between my legs grew more defined: I felt like a ventriloquist, locking his protesting dolls in to a trunk.

We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

What does it say? I said, when I had. She said, It is filled with all the words for how I want you...Look.

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

I wouldnt mind being a fly on the wall in a few Victorian parlours.

Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?

life is crap but, every day is an experience

For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?

I used to hate flying. I would sit there, rigid, convinced that if I relaxed, the plane would drop out of the sky.

I never expected my books to do even as well as they have. I still feel grateful for it, every single day.

All unwillingly I opened my eyes - then I opened them wider, and lifted my head. The heat, my weariness, were quite forgotten. Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this there was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.

Ours is a world which feels so unsettled and dangerous in large ways, whether its terrorism or global financial meltdown or climate change - huge things that affect us deeply, and yet things about which we can do, individually, very little.

How will a person know, Selina, when the soul that has the affinity with hers is near it? She answered, She will know. Does she look for air, before she breathes it? This love will be guided to her and when it comes, she will know. And she will do anything to keep that love about her, then. Because to lose it will be like a death to her.

.. now i begin to feel a longing so great, so sharp, i fear it will never be assuaged. i think it will mount, and mount, and make me mad, or kill me.

Your twisting is done--you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?

..this feeling haunts and inhabits me, like a sickness. it covers me, like skin.