Every day the eye is subject to a thousand tiny shocks as a thousand industries compete for the eye-kick, the visual hook that will lock the consumer into product for that crucial second where the tiny - or not so tiny - leap of the imagination is made.

The blood in my veins is frozen but it sings of love.

If I couldn't get published tomorrow I'd still be writing. It's something to do with feeling so overwhelmed by this experience of life that you have to tell someone about it, and in a way that reorders the experience to make it manageable.

The overintellectualization of surrealism can be a bromide. A dream interpreted is a deflated dream.

The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.

Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.

George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.