"It's kinda old hat now, I guess, to have a paper dictionary, but I loved our dictionary so much-flicking through a book WITH ALL THE WORDS IN was like having a book with a million Christmases in. I kept a list of my most precious words on my wall, like trophies, or pressed flowers, or phone-numbers of hot boys: "Jaguary, mimosa, cathedral, lilac, shagreen, ardent, isosceles, attar of roses, uxurious, leopardskin, jubilee, zoo." Every dictionary contains every word, and therefore every book-just not yet in the right order. Just like every person has a book inside them, too-just not yet in the right order. We are all dictionaries."

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."