You built your walls too, she tells him. So I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her.

She lights a match in the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the candle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands on her thighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she slap breathes in light.

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.

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

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.