For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover's name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.

He will hear the rain before he feels it, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves.

Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

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

How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.