Things are not what they seem.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.

Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

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.