If the demons lived anywhere it was here.
I go to the bathroom. All my life I have been an orphan and an only child. Now I come from a big noisy family who go ballroom dancing and live forever.
Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people kept fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained.
When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.
My experience has been that times always ends. In theory, you are right, the quantum physicists are right, the religious and romantics are right. Time without end. In practice we both wear a watch.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
Well done, my fine fellow out of my womb. What have you gained? Nothing! And oh, what have you lost? Everything!
Happy Valentines Day to those who have found love, in whatever shape or form, and to those who are still hunting, don’t give up. If you feel bad, send yourself a card. You must be worth it.
Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.
Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.
I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.
Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.
There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
Wherever love is, I want to be, I will follow it as surely as the land-locked salmon finds the sea.
You know every cell in our bodies is completely renewed every seven years, so how can we talk about being the same person? We’re absolutely not.