I could have hated him for saying it: it was like a claim. If you really loved me, I thought, you’d behave like any other injured husband. You’d get angry and your anger would set me free.
Why did you give Querry Deo Gratias?’ ‘He’s cured, but he’s a burnt-out case, and I don’t want to send him away. He can sweep a floor and make a bed without fingers or toes.’ ‘Our visitors are sometimes fastidious.’ ‘I assure you Querry doesn’t mind. In fact he asked for him.
Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of tragedy.
I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.
There was no scene, no tears, just thought – the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.
You think you are so bad,′ she said, ‘but it was only because you couldn’t bear the pain. But “they” can bear pain – other people’s pain – endlessly. They are the people who don’t care.
A writer’s knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.
Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn’t know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.
I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn’t exist – mental concepts.
You have a sense of humour. I am in favor of jokes. They have political value. Jokes are a release for the cowardly and the impotent.
An artist paints his picture not in a few hours but in all the years of experience before he takes up the brush, and it is the same with failure.
One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal.
What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed m their palaeolithic world.
He wasn’t a patient. I expect someone cured him. You cure a lot of people in this country, don’t you, with bullets?
Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.
The old women gossiped as they always had done, squatting on the floor outside the urinoir, carrying Fate in the lines of their faces as others on the palm.
She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust.
Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round.
Everything had seemed possibile. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream, there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time for a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind – until one day to you own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn’t believe in.
When a train pulls into a great city I am reminded of the closing moments of an ouverture.