Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

Mine the long night The secret place Where lovers meet In long embrace In purple dark In silvered kiss Forget the world And grasp your bliss

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.

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