Self-creation is the highest art.
My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spellbound.
We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.
People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.
The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.
There's no need to inundate the world with books and language. It's just too full already. There's so much rubbish hiding in the world. But as long as I think I can do something inventive and insightful, then I'll keep doing it.
Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
If women had never been given the right to vote, then Labour would have won every election after the war.
The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things. . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.
People do see me as sweet and innocent. Not to say that I am not those things. But I have other sides to me.