Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable.
One must talk. That’s how it is. One must.
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.
To love one child and to love all children, whether living or dead -somewhere these two loves come together. To love a no-good but humble punk and to love an honest man who believes himself to be an honest man -somewhere these, too, come together.
I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight.
War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.
In a thousand years time this day will have existed for a thousand years to the day. And the ignorance of the whole world about what they’ve said today will have a date too.
What she said was always strange. It had happened long ago. It seemed insignificant. And yet it was something you remembered forever. The words as well as the story. The voice as much as the words.
Some people are like that – closed – they can’t learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can’t learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.
I’ve forgotten the words with which to tell you. I knew them once, but I’ve forgotten them, and now I’m talking to you without them.
I have never waited for anything the way I’ve waited for today, when nothing will happen.
And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity.
I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.
You give me a great desire to love.
The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.
You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.
You think of outside your room, of the streets of the town, the lonely little squares over by the station, of those winter Saturdays all alike.
Don’t be afraid anymore. Not of anyone. Not of anything. Nothing. Ever again. Listen to me: not ever again.