One must talk. That's how it is. One must.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

Get rid of things or you'll spend your whole life tidying up.

Banality is sometimes striking.

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.