I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.

To know I was beautiful in his eyes made me beautiful.

It's not that he was going nowhere, it's that he'd already arrived.

I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.

Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

She’s never where she is,' I said. 'She’s only inside her head.