A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle. Half my days I cannot bear to touch you. The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear. No date. No name attached.
A blind lover, don’t know what I love till I write it out.
So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.
Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.
But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past.
There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.
In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.
Once I’ve discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
I don’t have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
When I read biographies, I skip the first thirty pages about the childhood because it doesn’t seem interesting to me.
Politically I also don’t believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it’s like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.
I’ve always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.
If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.
There always should be something hanging unfinished before a scene ends so that there’s a reason for going to the next scene.
People don’t write about kids; you have to give them a lot of freedom, and that causes anarchy and that causes farce.
I often need a limited space. It’s like having a house to roam around in and reinvent and have things to happen in, kind of like a French farce. Doors opening, doors closing, new people arriving, and disappearing, and so forth.
I kind of was shoveled onto a boat at 11 and went to England. I didn’t have any parent watching over me. It was very free and may have been a bit of a scary time for me, but I really don’t remember much about the voyage apart from playing ping-pong a lot with a couple friends.
There’s a lot of thievery involved in writing. You’re breaking into other people’s spaces and other people’s stories.
She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.