I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.

I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.

Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.

I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space."

Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting each other without having to consult their appointment diaries, not being able to record anything from the television; if you missed it you missed it - these were all the kinds of thing that made up the normality of the seventies.

I feel like the seventies was a decade where things ran out, and where other things set in. There was just a lurking graininess and seediness about the decade, a slight grogginess of the hangover from the sixties.

[My muse] feels nostalgic for Japan, and, perhaps strangely, for the pioneer days of America.