Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' — 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit o...
This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted pers...
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed a...
Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages,...
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the...
A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.
When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the nex...
In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but v...
Do not start me on
Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what...
Realism can break a writer's heart.
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.