Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

Because a women's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him. What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing fling was one thing, an affair of the heart quite another. Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing.

Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.