At times truth may not seem probable.
We dream of the world we could have made, and wake up in the world that we did.
Some days I am the flower beneath the machine. And the machine rolls slowly on, blocking the sun, without a care for what it tramples beneath.
Smile sometimes: it won’t add years to your life, but it will add life to your years.
I want to avoid people, because there’s only one thing worse than being homeless, and that’s people who are not, knowing that you are.
My landlord lives in the flat at the bottom of the stairs. I rent a studio flat from him, and live at the top of the staircase. There are two more flights of stairs and four more flats, but it’s me he is obsessed with.
I was staying in a hotel in San Francisco for a couple of nights, before flying back to the UK. My hotel was a desperate grey block made from paper and people’s screams. At night the sound of strangers having icy sex echoed off the building and poured through the broken air conditioning, like tiny daggers I couldn't see, reminding me of just the tip of what I was missing.
At the door of life by the gate of breath, There are worse things waiting for men than death.
Sometimes language gets in the way of the story's feelings. The reader finds himself experiencing the language of the story rather than the story. The words sit there on the page like coins, with their own opacity, as though they're there for their own sake. "A man goes into a phone booth, stirring coins in his palm. " "Stirring" is such an obviously selected word. You can feel the writer looking for the word as he sat at the typewriter.
It comes down to the experience of it. The more you fight, the more you know, the more you can use in the ring.
You're either coaching it or allowing it to happen.