There’s no match for the silence of GOD.
It’s one of those unforgettable moments that happen as a child, when you discover that all along the world has been betraying you.
The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.
And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.
I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook – this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.
We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence.
I scowled at the world. And the world scowled back. We were locked in a stare of mutual disgust.
To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.
If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory – and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place – the more frightening it is, because I have no plan.
Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.
All I want is not to die on a day when I went unseen.
Empty teacups gathered around her and dictionary pages fell at her feet.
Better to try and fail than not to try at all.
I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.
I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.
I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.
I am always coming up with architectural metaphors when I think about writing. But I think one of the things that draw us to literature is that it gives us this very attractive illusion that there is meaning in the world – things connect.
I used to think that if I had a choice between writing well and living well, I would choose the former. But now I think that’s sheer lunacy. Writing weighs so much less, in the great cosmic equation, than living.
My first novel, ‘Man Walks Into a Room,’ is about a man who’s lost his memory and has to start a second life. On one level, it’s about how we create a coherent sense of self.