Sola en mi habitación, girando con el mundo entero en la cabeza desde el primer día en que nací.

I have a room all to myself; it is nature.

I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.

My home is in my head.

I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

Here in a little lonely room
I am master of earth and sea,
And the planets come to me.

My head's a carousel of pictures and
The spinning never stops.

I am my world.

You may think I’m small, but I have a universe in my head.

I'm not close to people, I am close to myself. I spend a lot of time inside.

You may think I’m small, but I have a universe inside my mind.

My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.

I wasn’t a lonely kid — I was good at being alone. I’d read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I’m perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people.

Every room I've lived in since I was given my own room at eleven was lined with, and usually overfull of, books. My employment in bookstores was always continuous with my private hours: shelving and alphabetizing, building shelves, and browsing — in my collection and others — in order to understand a small amount about the widest possible number of books. Such numbers of books are constantly acquired that constant culling is necessary; if I slouch in this discipline, the books erupt. I've also bricked myself in with music — vinyl records, then compact discs. My homes have been improbably information-dense, like capsules for survival of a nuclear war, or models of the interior of my own skull. That comparison — room as brain — is one I've often reached for in describing the rooms of others, but it began with the suspicion that I'd externalized my own brain, for anyone who cared to look.