Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.
I shop online because I don’t like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
I avoid looking in the mirror.
Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks – tales of erotic suffering.
Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.
The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.
I used to retain information extremely fast, so perhaps it’s hardening a bit and I don’t take the impression as well as I used to. Instead of writing in free flight, I had to check on the stories all the time. So I have decided I better to do it while I am fresh!
Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.
The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul – lust.
The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.
The tales are quite hard to remember and I found that going back to it between bouts of writing fiction, I was having to retrace my steps quite a lot, because the stories are very intricate and the material is elusive, and possibly with age, my memory is not as malleable as it used to be.
The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.
The stories are most often about justice. In her stories, those who commit injustice, or act tyrannically, come to no good. They are punished.
Love can make you turn on yourself, and it can do harmful things to you. It’s a deep lesson in human psychology, as with many of the stories. Anyways, that’s just an example of one of the most wicked women in the Nights.
I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.
The tripartite structure – so you remember the third brother, second brother, first brother, or the first dervish, second dervish, and third dervish. This is very like embroidering a cloth, as you have to know where you are with the knots.
I do not think commodities are taken for granted. One of the convergences in time I noticed, and to me seemed very important, was the emergence of paper money. There had been permissionary notes, exchanging money by writing it, but there was no duplicated form of guaranteeing an exchange.
Scheherazade, of course, was always in the back of my mind, because she’s also a storyteller identified as female who tells a lot of anti-female stories. There’s a parade in The Arabian Nights of sorceresses, adulteresses, ghouls, sirens, harridans.