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The book rolls forward at its own rate, acting as a black hole that sucks into it everything I think, witness, overhear and see on TV. Today, instead of trying to perfect each paragraph before I moved forward, I thought, ‘Fuck this! I’ll keep barrelling on.’ Hours passed in big bursts and I ended u…

I think of my characters now as actual people. Their ‘paltry experiences’ have actually happened. I long to continue the slow, deliberate hacking of stone which will allow me to know their futures.

He said that I was very ‘touchy’. I said that this was true. He asked what he did, or was, that made him hard to live with. After a lot of thought I said it was his tendency to enjoy stressing the negative in everything that came up; that it made me very tired, as if I were dragging behind me a hea…

William Styron in Darkness Visible—how hearing Brahms’ ‘Alto Rhapsody’ had hauled him back from suicide. A day when I’d been struggling with V and was dully washing up: the radio was on, and they played a Brahms string quartet. For the first time I knew what the word ‘grace’ meant. It came dropping…

I have to swear an affidavit for F’s and my divorce. I went to the university bank and asked if they had a JP. A shy young man with gold-rimmed spectacles dug out from his glassed cubicle a tiny, battered, green New Testament. There we stood at the open counter, in full view of customers and teller…