I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.
I feel in colour, strong tones that I hue down for the comfort of the pastelly inclined. Beige and magnolia and a hint of pink are what the well-decorated heart is wearing; who wants my blood red and...
I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues...
I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.
I don't expect to be happy. I don't imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don't think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of...
I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the...
I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. T...
I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak...
I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.
I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.
I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.My passion for her, even though she could...
I am crawling like one of those children who pulled coal wagons in the depths of the earth. I am on my hands and knees and listening to the boom boom above, or is it my pulse, my heart? I don’t know....
How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in anothe...
He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't gro...
He turned away and I turned to him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. I...
Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are...
Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space.
First there is the forest and inside the forest the clearing and inside the clearing the cabin and inside the cabin the mother and inside the mother the child and inside the child the mountain.
Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.
Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has to hear langua...