So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.
Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.
All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..
...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.
Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made a mistake of paying the taxi driver with a check made out of toilet paper.
Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.
They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.
