A novel is a mirror walking down a road.
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.
It’s a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what’s beyond in the darkness, beyond where you’re writing.
One of the things that happens in novels it’s almost like a continual debate with yourself. That’s why you’re writing the book. It’s why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
Love is so small it can tear itself through the eye of a needle.
And it would be a spare life he would be certain to lead as a schoolteacher in some urban location. But he had a serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by.
Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you’re not.
For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn’t be.
When I write my novels I don’t really have a huge plan beforehand; I don’t have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.
Jung was absolutely right about one thing. We are occupied by gods. The mistake is to identify with the god occupying you.
So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.
I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.
Sadness is very close to hate.
Research can be a big clunker. It’s difficult to know how you can make the historical light.