You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.

Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars.

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.