Now the towns and forests, highways and plains, fall back in circles like an emptying drain. And I won't come round this way again, where the lonely … - Joanna Newsom

Well, Nabokov is definitely my favorite author, though I feel strange calling him an "influence," since I can't trace the ways in which his writing may or may not have seeped into my own. But I also love William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, Kenneth Patchen, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Mark Helprin (who wrote a beautiful book called Winter's Tale), and Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite book of all time is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

Now her coat drags through the water,
Bagging, with a life's-worth of hunger, limitless minnows
In the magnetic embrace,
Balletic and glacial, of Bear's insatiable shadow.

It does not suffice
for you to say I am a sweet girl,
or to say you hate to see me sad
because of you.
It does not suffice,
to merely lie beside each other,
as those who love each other do.