If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

La paz es como el cristal: si se golpea repetidamente, termina mostrando su fragilidad.

Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.

Finished in a frenzy that reminded me of our last night in Cambridge. Watched my final sunrise. Enjoyed a last cigarette. Didn’t think the view could be any more perfect until I saw that beat-up trilby. Honestly, Sixsmith, as ridiculous as that thing makes you look, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful....

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye.

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

As if Art is the What, not the How!

A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat

there’re times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice

I added ‘writers’ to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.

Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines.

Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.

Disco’s are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don’t.

The soul is a verb. . . . Not a noun.

The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.

What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?” I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy. Melphi seemed delited. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are...

(…)entre todas las razas del mundo, nuestra sed, o mejor dicho, nuestra avidez, de tesoros, de oro, de especias y de dominio, ¡oh, si!, sobre todo del dulce dominio, ¡es la más aguda, la más insaciable, la más carente de todo escrúpulo! Es esta avidez la que alimenta nuestro progreso, no sé si con fines...

Orito banishes all thoughts of Jacob de Zoet, and recalls Jacob de Zoet.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

I could never describe a race of savages too backwards to throw a spear as ‘noble.

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.

But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block…

are a sordid, low-budget French film. The sort you’d stumble across on TV at night. You know you’ll regret it in the morning, but you keep watching anyway.

…It’s as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn’t matter. I mean, I know we’re all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the people who genuinely believe it doesn’t tend to be the...

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I’ll be waiting for you there.

. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues

The learnin’ mind is the livin’ mind… an’ any sort o’ smart is truesome smart, old smart or new, high smart or low.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.

How about this? Hong Kong had been appropriated by British drug pushers in the 1840s. We wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and spices. The Chinese didn’t want our clothes, tools, or salted herring, and who can blame them? They had no demand. Our solution was to make a demand, by getting large sections of the populace...

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun...

There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything’s already turning into something else!

Better a soulless clone… than a souled roach.

There’s no future in stories…Stories are things of the past, things for museums.

Her zaman başka bir savaş çıkar, Robert. Kökleri hiçbir zaman tamamen kazınmaz. Savaşları ne alevlendirir? Güç arzusu, insan doğasının belkemiği. Şiddet tehdidi, şiddet korkusu ya da şiddetin kendisi bu dehşet verici arzunun aracıdır. Güç arzusunu yatak odalarında, mutfaklarda, fabrikalarda, sendikalarda ve devletlerin sınırlarında görebilirsin. Bunu iyi dinle ve aklına yaz. Ulus-devlet insan doğasının şişirilip devasa...

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. ‘What did they do to you?’Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. ‘They’-he looks about the Chapel-‘cured me. They cured me of a terrible wasting disease called mortality. There’s a lot of it about. The...

Loyalty looks simple… but it ain’t.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year’s fragments into a ‘sextet for overlapping soloists’: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order....

Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he’d just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes...

Any society’s upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d’you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.

Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows.

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

The truth is “#9dream” is a descendant of “Norwegian Wood”. Both are ghost stories. “She” in “Norwegian Wood” curses you with loneliness. The “Two spirits dancing so strange” in “#9dream” bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.