I have learned since that sometimes the things we want most are impossible for us. You may long to come home, yet wander forever.
The function of a writer is to make sense of life. It is such a mystery, it changes all the time, like the light.
It’s absolutely fatal to your writing to think about how your work will be received. It’s a betrayal of whatever talent you have.
In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.
Writers themselves don’t analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.
I never talk about what I’m writing about currently, never. It’s private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
You can’t be afraid to do good in case evil results.
Newspapers are horror happening to other people.
People give one another things that can’t be gift wrapped.
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.
Rebirth. I mean by this simply what happens when the child begins to realise the fact that the black does not enter through the white’s front door is not in the same category as the fact that the dead will never come back.
If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.
It’s easier for the former masters to put aside the masks that hid their humanity than for the former slaves to recognise the faces underneath. Or to trust that this is not a new mask these are wearing.
Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.