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

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.

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

His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.

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

Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own.

My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day.