We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.
The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.
I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime — the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling — until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.
There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.
I’m full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
You know, artists don’t really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.
For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.