London Fields

The driver treated his cab as a peasant might treat his horse or ass, with numb and proprietorial cruelty. The bursts of acceleration were like long-toothed, lip-flapping exhalations; then came the looping whinny of the brakes.

The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P. G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

Of all the forces, love is the strangest. ... Love can make a woman pick up a bus, or it can crush a man under the weight of a feather. Or it just lets everything go on as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. That's the kind of force love is.

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought-experiment. At the camp fire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way.

Love is blind; but it makes you see the blind man, teetering on the roadside; it makes you seek him out with eyes of love.

Character is destiny.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full contact — all that?

Sitting there beside the bookcase, trying to read, in a growing panic of self-consciousness. Why? Because reading presupposed a future.

We are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

I think it was Montherlant who said that happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page.

And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look, and feel, like shit.

This is the story of a murder. It hasn't happened yet. But it will. (It had better.) I know the murderer, I know the murderee. I know the time, I know the place. I know the motive (her motive) and I know the means. I know who will be the foil, the fool, the poor foal, also utterly destroyed. I couldn't stop them, I don't think, even if I wanted to. The girl will die. It's what she always wanted. You can't stop people, once they start. You can't stop people, once they start creating.What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic, and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?

I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.

What saddened and incensed her was the abdication of power, so craven, the surrender so close to home. And power was what she was in for. Nicola had lived deliciously, but she was promiscuous on principle, as a sign of emancipation, of spiritual freedom, freedom from men. She was, she believed, without appetite, and prided herself on her passionless brilliance in bed. But then the subtle rearrangement, and the abject whisper... and it poisoned everything, somehow.

Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery=board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. She seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an addict, like a waxless candle. Jesus, have you seen her recently? We used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries.