As A Writer, You Owe

I Was The Subject Of An Experiment In Love. I Lived My Life Under Her Gaze, Undergoing Certain Trials For Her So That She Would Not Have To Undergo Them For Herself. But, How Are Our Certainties Forged, Except By The Sweat And Tears Of Other People? If Your Parents Don't Teach You How To Live; You Learn It From Books; And Clever People Watch You Learn From Your Mistakes.

Why Are We So Attached To The Severities Of The Past? Why Are We So Proud Of Having Endured Our Fathers And Our Mothers, The Fireless Days And The Meatless Days, The Cold Winters And The Sharp Tongues? It's Not As If We Had A Choice.

I Would Have Been A Disaster As A Career Politician. I Would Never Have Toed A Party Line.

I Loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That Book Gave Me Courage.

A Sea-green Sky: Lamps Blossoming White. This Is Marginal Land: Fields Of Strung Wire, Of Treadless Tyres In Ditches, Fridges Dead On Their Backs, And Starving Ponies Cropping The Mud. It Is A Landscape Running With Outcasts And Escapees, With Afghans, Turks And Kurds: With Scapegoats, Scarred With Bottle And Burn Marks, Limping From The Cities With Broken Ribs. The Life Forms Here Are Rejects, Or Anomalies: The Cats Tipped From Speeding Cars, And The Heathrow Sheep, Their Fleece Clotted With The Stench Of Aviation Fuel.