We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

All my life I've been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

That sort of reception - where everything is assimilated to the world of celebrity - makes me dream of becoming a more recalcitrant, harder to assimilate writer.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Few ever see what is not already inside their heads.

Strictly speaking, it is doubtful that a photograph can help us understand anything.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.