Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

My hatred of crowds, the obviousness of crowds, of anything en masse. Is this why I like little-known books? A general desire to escape the main world.

There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.