But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in

You start to think of contempt as a virus. Infecting individuals first, but spreading rapidly through families, communities, peoples, power structures, nations. Less flashy than hate. More deadly. When contempt kills you, it doesn’t have to be a vendetta or even entirely conscious. It can be a passing whim. It’s far more common, and therefore more lethal.

The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.

What was amazing about the apartments of long-standing adults was the accumulation of incidental texture. Not: I went and bought this lamp and this poster so I would have a lamp and a poster to furnish my life. But just stuff, so much stuff everywhere, somehow the consequence of a certain amount of time on earth.

The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation…

I think I was strange to my mother and to my father, a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end – we are not our parents and they are not us – my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years… whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.

It was like tag, but a girl was never “It,” only boys were “It,” girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.

Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating, your conception of reality.

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And.

How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably.

Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money.

I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying somebody else’s baby on her hip and looking over at you with a secret she can’t tell. It.

Experience rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. Writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pout it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.

Then they had gone outside, onto the steps, where a breeze lifted secondhand confetti.

You’re next. It’s the next thing. Next stop Kilburn Station. The doors fold inwards, urban insect closing its wings.

I think Seneca is right: life feels longer the more you engage with it.

Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a selection of scented erasers. Time is not what it is but how it is felt, and Zora felt no different.

Cigarettes took them to medals, which took them to guns, which took them to radios, which took them to jeeps. By midnight, Samad had won three jeeps, seven guns, fourteen medals, the land attached to Gozan’s sister’s house, and an IOU for four horses, three chickens and a duck.

He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.

When in the presence of a child, get on the floor.

We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be.

9. But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.

But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

He’d turned to me, red-faced, and asked: ‘If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

Beggars cannot be choosers.

Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

I couldn’t afford to be offended.

This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn’t feel you could call people. They didn’t feel they could phone you. How does one cry for help from these seasonal prisons.

Thirty years – almost all of them really happy. That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it’s over…

If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.

If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.

I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

She was motivated by something else: impatience. To Aimee poverty was one of the world’s sloppy errors, one among many, which might be easily corrected if only people would bring to the problem the focus she brought to everything.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word.

She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she had to wonder what she’d ever meant by the word.

I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age.

I’d decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway.

Porque el divorcio es eso: quitarle cosas que no ya no necesita a una persona a la que ya no quieres.

Involved is neither good nor bad. It is just a consequence of living, a consequence of occupation and immigration, of empires and expansion, of living in each other’s pockets… one becomes involved and it is a long trek back to becoming uninvolved.

Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. He has always denied this.

But I was so much older then,” sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, “I’m younger than that now.

Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you.

I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

I did come out with two invaluable intimations. Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.

As far as I’m concerned, if you want to find out about the last day of WWII or the roots of the Indian Mutiny, get thee to a books catalogue.

This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

I don’t keep any copies of my books in the house – they go to my mum’s flat. I don’t like them around.

Without the balancing context of everyday life, all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.

When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines – I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time.

My evidence – such as it is – is almost always intimate. I feel this – do you? I’m struck by this thought – are you.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

But sometimes it’s like you just meet someone and you just know that you’re totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother – or your sister. Even if they don’t, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don’t matter if they do or they don’t see that for what it is – all you can do is put the feeling out there. That’s your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That’s the deal.

Faith involves an acceptance of absurdity.

You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross.

A carefully preserved English accent also upped the fear factor.

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting.

More silence; children’s silence, so desperately desired by adults yet eerie when it finally occurs.

E in passato, si chiese Archie, la gente imbrogliava di meno? Era piu’ onesta, lasciava la porta di casa aperta, affidava i figli ai vicini, faceva visite agli amici, aveva il conto aperto con il macellaio.

So I might say to her: look, the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes – and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.

They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.

The thing I feared was no longer my parents’ authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.

Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.

I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom.

Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, “It’s two o’clock in the afternoon!” and so we put down our glasses and sigh.

We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.

And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.

Oh, I know that. You know me, baby, I cannot be broken. Takes a giant to snap me in half.

Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, “Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing – loads of Indian people.” To which you want to reply, “Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing – loads of white people.

The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: ‘To give them no excuse.

If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out.

Nobody can cast themselves out.

I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win.

Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one.

When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open.

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.

To her credit, though, Trace didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

You can feel bad… I mean, that’s not illegal.

At least then, we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate.

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was from somewhere. She had roots.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

I’m most honest about writing when I’m talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Did all friendships – all relations – involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power.

They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world – and most recently in America – the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.

Nostalgia is a luxury.

I fill the time that might have been usefully devoted to sculpture with things like drinking and staring into space.

Great care was taken at all times to protect me from reality. They’d met people like me before. They knew how little reality we can take.

Back then, we were all still willing to take the “risk,” if “risk” is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.

He is a black man. He is often thought of as a nothing, a cipher. But he has layers upon layers upon layers.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

She was that age. Whatever she said burst like genius into centuries of silence. Whatever she touched was the first stroke of its kind. Whatever she believed was not formed by faith but carved from certainty. Whatever she thought was the first time such a thought had ever been thunk.

The story was the price you paid for the rhythm.

Libraries are not failing “because they are libraries.” Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

And then she reverses direction and heads straight for Willesden Bookshop, an independent shop that rents space from the council and provides – no matter what Brent Council may claim – an essential local service. It is run by Helen. Helen is an essential local person. I would characterize her essentialness in the following way: ‘Giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted.’ Important category.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That’s no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is “color-blind,” by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color – to look past it – to the “you” beneath. Not content with colonizing your country, he now colonizes your self.

To think of a hate crime as the most uniquely heinous of crimes seems to lend it, in my mind, an undeserved aura of power. I’d rather something else. The police are investigating this crime as an acute abjection. The police are investigating this as a crime pitiful as it is appalling, pathetic as it is monstrous.

That feeling. That’s the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made.

She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.

My rage was the only thing keeping me awake, I was feeding off it in that righteous way you can if you never mention out loud the wrong you are being done.

It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.

Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;… Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

All day long I can look forward to a popsicle.

I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

This was one of the little ways in which he said sorry. They were meant to add up each day.

He had her in his heart, but not always in his mind.

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition – it’s something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you’re still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There’s no proper term for it – original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

She could not do distress. Anger was so much easier. And quicker and harder and better. If I start crying, I’ll never stop –you hear people say that; Kiki heard people say it all the time in the hospital. A backlog of sadness for which there would never be sufficient time.

It is the most ridiculous country in the world, Bangladesh. It is God’s idea of a really good wheeze, his stab at black comedy.

Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning.

That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality.

I gather sentences round, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad. Except that analogy’s screwy – cheerleaders cheer. I put up placards that make me feel bad.

Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns.

A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.

I’m not sure if you’re the person for me any more.

Don’t we all know why nerds do what they do? To get money, which leads to popularity, which leads to girls.

We were to remember that we were beautiful, intelligent, capable, kings and queens, in possession of a history, in possession of a culture, in possession of ourselves, and yet the more she filled the room with this effortful light, the clearer the sense I got of the shape and proportions of the huge shadow that must, after all, hang over us. One.

It’s a funny thing about rap, that when you say ‘I’ into the microphone, it’s like a public confession. It’s very strange.

I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, “an intellectual,” because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments.

Still starving themselves, still reading women’s magazines that explicitly hate women, still cutting themselves with little knives in places they think can’t be seen, still faking their orgasms with men they dislike, still lying to everybody about everything.

The choices a writer makes within a tradition – preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme – constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

She struggled to think of anyone besides perhaps James Baldwin and Jesus who had experiences the profound isolation and loenliness she now knew to be the one and only true reality of this world.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.

Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself.

English writing tends to fall into two categories – the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there’s definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

This because it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England’s got to give.

She loved you in the morning because the day was new.

It just goes to show,’ said Alsana, revealing her English tongue, “you go back and back and back and it’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

You’re a library of me.

I wouldn’t write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it’s a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time for anything else.

And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day.

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship… Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don’t experience your self as “natural” or “inevitable” – as so many other people seem to do – and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.

The fear was respect, the respect, fear. If you didn’t have the fear you had nothing.

It’s still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.

World makers, social network makers, ask one question first: ‘How can I do it.

But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can’t be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It is for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men.

But dying is no easy trick. And suicide can’t be put on a list of Things To Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It is for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life – it changed the trajectory of my life.

Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people.

I was fourteen: the world was pain.

There’s never any knowing – how am I to put it? – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever. – E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread.

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals – that they can’t help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It’s the last stop on the nutso express.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It’s the last stop on the nutso express.

It seems to me,” said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, “that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.

I wrote ‘White Teeth’ in the late nineties. I didn’t really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn’t matter what the lady believed.

No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed.

Every New Year’s Eve is impending apocalypse in miniature.

Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.

I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them; most writers groups moonlight as support groups for the kind of people who think that writing is therapeutic. Writing is the exact opposite of therapy.

I don’t ask myself what did I live for, said Carlene strongly. That is a man’s question. I ask whom did I live for.

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 reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.

People don’t settle for people. They resolve to be with them. It takes faith. You draw a circle in the sand and agree to stand in it and believe in it.

A writer’s duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

American houses… ′ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean.

Between propriety and joy choose joy.

It was a kiss from the past.

Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with.

I always tell my students: “A style is a means of insisting on something.” A line of Sontag’s.

I’m a writer who never writes about sex. It’s so far from my own fictional world.

It’s difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

She did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead.

She did what girls generally do when they don’t feel the part: she dressed it instead.

This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience-these are the marks of living.

I like books that don’t give you an easy ride. I like the feeling of discomfort. The sense of being implicated.

No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.

Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting.

But what does soulful even mean? The dictionary has it this way: “expressing or appearing to express deep and often sorrowful feeling.” The culturally black meaning adds several more shades of color. First shade: soulfulness is sorrowful feeling transformed into something beautiful, creative and self-renewing, and – as it reaches a pitch – ecstatic. It is an alchemy of pain.

A dream was a house your brain made without your permission, precisely to preserve memories and experiences and wayward impulses for all eternity, even the dead ones that only caused you pain, the ones from which you most wanted to be free.

It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods – come and gone with the sun.

To a novelist, fluidity is the ultimate good omen; suddenly difficult problems are simply solved, intractable structural knots loosen themselves, and you come upon the key without even recognizing that this is what you hold.

The object of the passion is just an accessory to the passion itself.