Their faces were scarified in hideous whorls and dots. As for clothing, they dressed in vegetable matter. Another.

You got to think a musical instrument is human or, anyway, alive... You take a fiddle now, we say it has a neck, and in the human neck what do you find? Vocal cords like strings, where the sound comes from.

When the watermelons were as large as a child’s head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow.

Plumes of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air, elegant fountains and twisting snow devils, shapes of veiled Arab women and ghost riders dissolving in white fume.

And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.

The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening.

Billy stretched and yawned, his withered neck taut again for a few seconds. “I can feel the season changing,” he said. “Drawing in. This weather change coming means the end of hot weather. Time I got out to Gaze Island and worked on me poor old father’s grave. Put it off last year and the year before.” Some sadness straining the words. Billy seemed stored in an envelope; the flap sometimes lifted, his flattened self sliding onto the table.

It is a good thing for a man a hit bottom because that’s when he learns what he’s made out of.

The idea of the North was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, ‘Write what you know.’ It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don’t develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.