God Takes Out Your Heart

For Myself, The Only Way I Know How To Make A Book Is To Construct It Like A Collage: A Bit Of Dialogue Here, A Scrap Of Narrative, An Isolated Description Of A Common Object, An Elaborate Running Metaphor Which Threads Between The Sequences And Holds Different Narrative Lines Together.

Insights Don't Usually Arrive At My Desk, But Go Into Notebooks When I'm On The Move. Or Half-asleep.

We Have A Number Of Very Powerful Women In The World Now - Mrs. [angela] Merkel, Who The Germans Call Mutti. What Did We Call Mrs. [margaret] Thatcher? When She Was Minister Of Education, She Stopped The Children's Free School Milk. This May Sound Quaint, But After The War We Were Such A Malnourished Nation That Part Of The Founding Of The Welfare State Were Public Health Initiatives. Every Little Schoolchild Got Milk. Mrs. Thatcher Stopped It. They Called Her "maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher."

One Of The Ideals [margaret Thatcher] Grew Up With Was Self-denial And Postponement Of Gratification, And Yet She Went About To Create A Greedy, Short-term Society. It Is A Paradox.

He Once Thought It Himself, That He Might Die With Grief: For His Wife, His Daughters, His Sisters, His Father And Master The Cardinal. But Pulse, Obdurate, Keeps Its Rhythm. You Think You Cannot Keep Breathing, But Your Ribcage Has Other Ideas, Rising And Falling, Emitting Sighs. You Must Thrive In Spite Of Yourself; And So That You May Do It, God Takes Out Your Heart Of Flesh, And Gives You A Heart Of Stone.