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‘Writing: safe again.’ —Peter Handke. He’s more brutal with himself than I have ever been. He inspires me to try to be more truthful in this book. It’s hard, for I am always hiding something, either from myself or from the person who may or may not, today or on some future day, read this and be inc…

Peter Handke’s notebooks, The Weight of the World. Intense pleasure at the tininess of his observations. Actually, they’re not observations so much as junctions between moments. When I read them I feel that I am not after all crazy or even weird. I feel strengthened, private, encouraged. I feel the…

The Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante says that the writer is important not because he can write but because he can listen. His job is ‘to catch the human voice in flight’.

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.

In my dream someone said to me, ‘I want to look for some graves.’ I said, ‘So you can desecrate them?’ Even in my sleep I was laughing.