Intensity is the desire to receive. Open yourself to light and you will become light.

Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.

The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.

Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn't mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don't want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn't bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories.

The Anglo-American tradition is much more linear than the European tradition. If you think about writers like Borges, Calvino, Perec or Marquez, they're not bound in the same sort of way. They don't come out of the classic 19th-century novel, which is where all the problems start. 19th-century novels are fabulous and we should all read them, but we shouldn't write them.