I wanted her body and soul, but body first.

One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

The railway was part scalpel, part movie camera, slicing the city open, parading its inner workings at fifty frames per second. It was on the S-Bahn that she felt least abandoned, as if the act of travelling turned back the clock, and brought her nearer to the future she had lost.

All writers are insecure, the male ones especially. It's well known. Why else would they spend so much time on make-believe? They're only happy in their imaginary worlds, because that's where they're in charge - where they're God. Did you know that Hemingway's mother dressed him as a girl until he was six years old?" I was not offended by Claudia's glib psychological theory. Like many glib psychological theories, it struck me as fundamentally correct.

I was already at an age when putting off anything was a bad idea.

Desire is an appetite, quickly sated. Longing is a wound, an opening in the heart or the spirit. Whatever the cause, whatever the duration, it almost always leaves a scar.

I have found that in fiction one is freer to speak the truth, if only because in fiction the truth is not expected or required. You may easily disguise it, so that it is only recognized much later, when the story and the characters have faded into darkness.