It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos.
It is a long walk to table twelve. Not in distance, it is only twenty metres in distance, but it is a long walk through the thick smells and the loud voices and the demands; through the cries of Engli...
If my dad hadn’t died young? No way I’d be here. It’s the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks—the bloody Irish. That’s our secret fucking strength.
I saw I was lucky to have Lamin: while he engaged in his favorite activity—intense, whispered financial negotiation, with several parties at once—I was free to wander over to the cannon, to sit astrid...
I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined.
I don’t see anything ingenious about poverty like this. I don’t see anything ingenious about having ten children when you can’t afford one.Fern put his glasses back on and smiled at me sadly.Children...
I don't remember the song she sang – I never really liked her songs – but standing in the empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the...
Each couple is its own vaudeville act.
Crazy enough to start a war. There aren’t many people like that. Most of us just follow along once war has been announced.
But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a so...
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are no...
We are split people.
Thirty years - almost all of them really happy. That's a lifetime, it's incredible. Most people don't get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it's over...
The window logs Kilburn’s skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling li...
The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.
The clarity disturbed me. She
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
Now, how do the young prepare to meet the old? The same way the old prepare to meet the young: with a little condescension; with low expectation of the other’s rationality; with the knowledge that the...
Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. So you see, we were better off the way we were.