what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.