The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust rags to rags fear to fear.
I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than I had ever been.
It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling…
It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.
A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.
paradise seemed further away than India, but Hell had become a bit closer
I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That’s the novelist’s gift, isn’t it?
To go back home was to play with impressions in this way, the way I played with the first pair of glasses I had, looking at a world now sharp and small and not quite real, now standard in size and real but blurred.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Certain emotions bridge the years and link unlikely places.
Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.