I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.