I offer myself in paint instead. It’s self flattering, but that’s our prerogative as artists – to record ourselves the way we wish.

Until the moment I met you, I always seem to be caught between dreading the responsibility of someone else’s love and being resentful that I didn’t feel properly loved myself. Often both seemed to exist at the same time. With you it’s different. I can’t hear enough about your love for me. Yet still, in some way I’m holding back. it’s as though I can’t fully let go without causing an eruption of need, hunger, and desire of such overwhelming proportions that it would wipe me out entirely.

Our house was a temple to The Book. We owned thousands, nay millions of books. They lined the walls, filled the cupboards, and turned the floor into a maze far more complex than Hampton Court’s. Books ruled out lives. They were our demi-gods.

I could see sunlight making exquisite patterns on the water’s surface above me. Everything seemed fascinating and very slow. All around me lionfish darted like golden suns and moons in an alchemists’s dream. I looked down to where a vast labyrinth of black seaweed awaited me.

Why is it that looking down seems so much higher than looking up?

It’s the nasty and the accident that form the foundation for elegance that comes later.

Sometimes willpower alone cannot make things happen.

I do what I want to do. I see where my enthusiasm is. Over the years, my techniques expanded. That’s how the writing came out.

Every one of us sees ‘green’ differently. So everything is an approximation of understanding.

The telephone is a great knee-jerk machine, but if you really want to tell someone how you feel, you need the slowness of the letter. In a society where everything is fast, it’s like going out in the country and looking up at the stars.