You're beautiful, but you're somewhere else. That's okay. I can handle that. But we won't continue as friends, not just now. I like you as a lover, not a friend.

Love could be fractured and serve different purposes, and that intense love could be divided, between people just as easily as between moments of time.

Everything comes to nothing in the end, I suppose. Or at least, nothing happens exactly the way we imagine it.

When you think you are in love, you don't want to know about the things that could end it.

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

Imperceptibly, more time passes when I'm not remembering our every moment together, not recreating our every conversation, re-imagining our love-making. It is immeasurably sad.

The wonder to me is not that she made it through at all but that she made it through so relatively intact, so vibrant. So free of bitterness and so empty of resentment.

Drought brings out the worst in us and it's easy to hate your fellow human beings.

And I come to realise that all my small todays, the way I act, will lead into my tomorrows.

In the presence of their love I sensed my lonliness, and I understood for a moment, clearly, that deep and basic human desire for companionship at depth.

When you can stop you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't.

From time to time it has struck me that as a writer, I've somehow managed to live my life as I had long ago dreamt of doing, based on the Tintin paradigm: on my toes, travelling, senses attentuated, everything just adventure and exploration, curiosity and problem-solving.

Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.