Why is the measure of love loss?

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long...

For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.

Passion out of passion’s obstacles.

…what he told himself on those sea-soaked nights…Others joined in and it was discovered that every light had a story-no, every light was a story. And the flashes themselves were the stories going out over...

Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.

Things are continually beginning again; they’re never really resolved, you know. They are only resolved temporarily. We live in a society that peddles solutions, whether it’s solutions to those extra pounds you’re carrying, or to...

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can...

Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under...

There will be a future. We believe in our unreality too strongly to give it up.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in...

Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver…History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore....

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

We’re a lukewarm people for all our feast days and hard work. Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us...

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what’s dead. It won’t complain.

Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to...

Why should literature be easy? Sometimes you can do what you want to do in a simple, direct way that is absolutely right. Sometimes you can’t. Reading is not a passive act. Books are not...

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present – the new chance.

Where you are born–what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own– stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

Bigger questions, questions with more than one answer, questions without an answer are the hardest to cope with in silence. Once asked they do not evaporate and leave the mind to its serener musings. Once...

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The...

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I read [in, Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot]: This is one moment, /...

She arches her body like a cat on a stretch. She nuzzles her cunt into my face like a filly at the gate. She smells of the sea. She smells of rockpools when I was...

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand. Divided and re-divided likemercury then gathered up only at the last moment.

There was a man here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned...

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return. And the wound will take you there.

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under.

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of...

I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day. A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

I can’t believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but...

Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens...

…there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it,...

I’ve always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I’ve worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the...

I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

If you do wrestle with it and find the spring of its opening it will be a place to rest in all the days of your life.

That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces...

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of language. It is a process at the same time physical and intellectual. The writer has...

Like most people, when I look back, the family house is held in time, or rather it is now outside of time, because it exists so clearly and it does not change, and it can...

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked,...

Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives...

[Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they’re doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes,...

We live as best we may in a world of worms.

By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.