But how to do feelings? All very well to write She felt sad, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immedia...
Blind luck, to arrive in the world with your properly formed parts in the right place, to be born to parents who were loving, not cruel, or to escape, by geographical or social accident, war or povert...
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one...
A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.
They knew each other as much as they knew themselves, and their intimacy, rather like too many suitcases, was a matter of perpetual concern; together they moved slowly, clumsily, effecting lugubrious...
The world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.
Falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.
[W]riting stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturisation. A world could be made in five pages....The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half...
And roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere.
We’ve built a world too complicated and dangerous for our quarrelsome natures to manage. In such hopelessness, the general vote will be for the supernatural. It’s dusk in the second Age of Reason. We...
We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same, lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before love-making is ill...
The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moment...
He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.
Each day he made attempts … but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free of its own idiom, its own authority, to offer the element of surprise th...
But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fas...
But here’s life’s most limiting truth – it’s always now, always here, never then and there. And
As we walked back to the car, Johnny said, A tree's one thing, but it's a big deal when you point a gun at someone. Basically, you're giving them permission to kill you.
Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.
A rather insistent cross-examiner asks a pathologist whether he can be absolutely sure that a certain patient was dead before he began the autopsy. The pathologist says he’s absolutely certain. Oh, bu...
When he wrote back, he pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity. For fear of his psychiatrist who was also their censor, they could never be sensual, or even emotional. His was consid...