A Writer Is A Foreign Country

I Seldom Read On Beaches Or In Gardens. You Can't Read By Two Lights At Once, The Light Of Day And The Light Of The Book. You Should Read By Electric Light, The Room In Shadow, And Only The Page Lit Up.

I Suddenly Remember Something I've Been Told About Fear. That Amid A Hail Of Machine Gun Fire You Notice The Existence Of Your Skin.

I Believe That Always, Or Almost Always, In All Childhoods And In All The Lives That Follow Them, The Mother Represents Madness. Our Mothers Always Remain The Strangest, Craziest People We've Ever Met.

People Come To Paris, To The Capital, To Give Their Lives A Sense Of Belonging, Of An Almost Mythical Participation In Society.

The Outrage Was On The Scale Of God. My Younger Brother Was Immortal And They Hadn't Noticed. Immortality Had Been Concealed In My Brother's Body While He Was Alive, And We Hadn't Noticed That It Dwelt There. Now My Brother's Body Was Dead, And Immortality With It. ... And The Error, The Outrage, Filled The Whole Universe.