"This collection of poetry and prose is a little like going for a long hike out into the redwoods and coming upon a beautiful library, well lit, and cozy and there’s no one but you and all these amazing books that you are welcome to read as long as you treat everything with the respect it deserves. Wouldn’t that be an amazing experience?"

"I left Africa and childish things, and went to live in Paris, where Thérèse Raquin kept me on the straight and narrow. Read at an impressionable age, it’s a very important moral life lesson about guilt and consequences—without ever having to stick your finger into the pit of hell itself. At the time I was going to the American Library, and looking at the handsome boys who didn’t know I existed because I was a little chubby teenager. The descriptions of Therese sitting there with Laurent, playing dominoes in their house above the shop, and that burning desire for somebody rang very true for a little plump 14-year-old on the banks of the Seine."