To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one's fellow countrymen.... But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.

The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic. We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message. The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.

All creation is in the art of seeing.