He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.

Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!