That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

We are lucky, even the worst of us, for daylight comes.