I let it go. It’s like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.
I’ve never been very good at leaving things behind. I tried, but I have always left fragments of myself there too, like seeds awaiting their chance to grow.
I sell dreams, small comforts, sweet harmless temptations to bring down a multitude of saints crashing among the hazels and nougatines.
Life is what you celebrate. All of it. Even its end.
I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I’m going to be immoderate – and volatile – I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant.
Some people spend the whole of their lives sitting waiting for one train, only to find that they never even made it to the station.
I have an advanced degree in procrastination and another one in paranoia.
Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.
You don’t write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.
A man who casts no shadow isn’t really a man at all.
Death should be a celebration. Like a birthday. I want to go up like a rocket when my time comes, and fall down in a cloud of stars, and hear everyone go: ahh!
For me, the magic of Hawaii comes from the stillness, the sea, the stars.
Divination is a means of telling ourselves what we already know.
Of course I didn’t pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
I’m not sure I believe in the whole ‘ghost-afterlife’ thing, but I think places are marked by people who have been there.
People reveal so much of their mental processes online, simply because the psychological effect of anonymity just means that a whole raft of inhibitions are left alone when people log on.
Somehow the anticipation of pain can be even more troubling, more a misery than the pain itself.
A little tantrum in real life seems so much bigger online.
Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.
All those moments, those memories. Everything that we are, compressed in just two or three kilos of paper – the weight of a human heart.