For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work.

Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

There are times when you want to stop working at faith and just be washed in a blowing wind that tells you everything.

Why are homosexuals addicted to soap opera? Because our lives are a vivid situation.

I am very unmusical. I can't carry a tune. I would never be able to play an instrument.

There were moments when she wasn't talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funnelled stretch of recent past.