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After dinner the waiter brought L the wrong coffee, was corrected, went away. Time passed. He realised he’d been forgotten and from that moment the evening was lost. He went dark and stiff with rage. Anger spread into the air around him. A grille clanged down between him and the world. I panicked. …

V’s proprietary tone when he speaks of the high priests of European literature—‘Yes, they are peculiar titles,’ he says about Canetti’s autobiography—reminds me of the German poet who boasted to me about how he had once sat up all night reading Chekhov’s letters. As if no one else had ever done thi…

Why married people have affairs: you feel luckier, with a happy secret place in your imagination in which to refresh yourself. My mistake in the past has been to keep it on the front boiler, cooking briskly, instead of turning off the gas and letting it go cold.

At Castlemaine it was very warm. Even the night was milder than I’d expected. Discouraging memories presented themselves as I roved about the slopes picking up firewood. What does this almost-finished book say about men and women? There doesn’t seem to be a way of planning this. My attitude emerges…

The day I realised my novel was going to be a short one, and that its domestic subject and setting were quite proper, I walked home from work and passed a print shop, in the window of which stood a copy of that van Gogh painting of the inside of his bedroom: floorboards, a bed, two cane-bottomed ch…