IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

August is a wicked month.

shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.