Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more – the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.
Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.
Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.
I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.
The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.
Tonight I can smell the season the way it’s usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you’re used to it, when you’ve forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with – more – makes what’s being told. A story is its style.
A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.
We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once.
I went to the top of Vesuvius and looked in.
Fashion is fickle, and I was published because I was fashionable. Because I was gay.
I was at the tail end of the family. The next brother along was already seven years older than me. I remember growing up by myself, playing games by myself.
I’m blessed in my good friends, and some of them happen to be writers, though that’s almost never what our friendships are about. And every writer I’ve ever read, living or dead, has in one way or another helped and inspired. I have a feeling it’s important not to mix the two up.
My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They’ve ended up in Scotland, where my father – well, both of them – will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.
Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson’s twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.
I want to be bored. But I can’t. But I really don’t want to be this thing that I’m having to be instead of being bored.
You never know if you’re a writer. You can’t trust it. If you woke up and said, ‘I’m a writer,’ it would be gone. You wouldn’t see anything for miles – even the dust would be running away.
Nothing is harmful to literature except censorship, and that almost never stops literature going where it wants to go either, because literature has a way of surpassing everything that blocks it and growing stronger for the exercise.