Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, gray members of a congregation of nightmare; hark! his long wavering howl . . . an aria of fear made audible. The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering.

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

I always used to suffer a great deal if I let myself get too close to reality since the definitive world of the everyday with itshard edges and harsh light did not have enough resonance to echo the demands I made upon experience. It was as if I never experienced experience as experience. Living never lived up to the expectations I had of it--the Bovary syndrome.