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.

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

No one needs a first edition. Whoever wrote it; even if it was Moses.

Because two people in love don't make a hive mind. Neither should they want to be a hive mind, to think the same, to know the same. It's about being separate and still loving each other, being distinct from each other. One is the violin string one is the bow.

But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don't take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.

It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped.

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.