“You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”

“History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...”

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”

“A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.”

“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither...”

“Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mime...”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”