They passed out of the shade beneath the eaves and flew into sunglare and silence and it was an action she only partly saw, elusive and mutely beautiful, the birds so sunstruck they were consumed by light, disembodied, turned into something sheer and fleet and scatter-bright.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

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

The future is always a wholeness, a sameness. We're all tall and happy there,' she said. 'This is why the future fails. It always fails. It can never be the cruel happy place we want to make it.

Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.