If you look at Japanese film, it is made up of collage or bricolage, it is made up of lists, and suddenly when you stand back from the lists you begin to see the pattern of a life.

A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands, knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.

We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.

Come. We must go deeper with no justice and no jokes.

We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders.

In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.