There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

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.

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.

The one of the great sadnesses of any life is knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.