When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.
Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don’t respect cowards.
I really wish they hadn’t made the set out of asbestos.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we’re now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.
Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretatio n for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.
Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.
Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.
Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.
If I want to act relaxed, it’s going to take all my cunning, skill and concentration.
The human world is made of stories, not people.
I love HBO productions, actually, like ‘The Wire.’
Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?
What is “poker”? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars.
I still haven’t quite got used to eating live fish.
I think it’s natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.
Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called ‘global literature’ is going.
I think we think in terms of stories.
But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.