Blackberry Wine

You don't write because someone sets assignments! You write because you need to write, or because you hope someone will listen or because writing will mend something broken inside you or bring something back to life.

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored.

The right circumstances sometimes happen of their own accord, slyly, without fanfare, without warning. Layman's alchemy. . . . The magic of everyday things.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.

It isn't just a village. The houses aren't just places to live. Everything belongs to everybody. Everyone belongs to everyone else. Even a single person can make a difference.

Their love was something which coloured the air between them like sunlight.

So much of his life seemed to be like this now, a blur of days without anything to define them from each other, like episodes of a soap he watched out of habit, even though none of the characters interested him.

The day stretched out in front of him like an empty road in the desert.

He drank, for the same reason he wrote second-rate science fiction. Not to forget but to remember, to open the past and find himself there again. He opened each bottle, began each story with the secret conviction that here was the magic drought that would restore him. But magic, like wine, needs the right conditions in order to work.

He was the cleanest-cut comic-book schoolboy hero imaginable.

There was a quote he could not quite remember, something about the past being an island surrounded by time. He had missed the last boat to the island.

You may be a foreigner, but you have the heart of a Frenchman.

And yet I could still hear them. As if some part of their essence had evaporated into the air, become a part of this place, ingrained, like the scent of cigarettes and burning sugar, in the woodwork and plaster. Everything was buzzing with that vanished presence, buzzing and singing and laughing louder than ever before, stone and tile and polished wood, all whispering with agitation and excitement; never still, never silent.

All right, Monsieur Jay,' she said, smiling. 'I'll tell them you're OK.