“Friendship is one friend betraying another friend to a third friend. With a fond friendly smile. The greater the betrayal, the greater the intimacy - the greater the friendship.”

“Friendship is greater than the colonial and dominating race ideologies of hundreds of years." -"Some of My Best Friends”

“...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.”

“Begin with the soft smelted upturned heart-shaped mouth made for smiling a smile kept for kindness, tenderness, incapable of malice. Am I going too fast for you?The almond eyes see out through their sleepy epicanthic fold. Trusting and calm, if a flicker from slowness, a further flicker from stupidity.Settled in slow-motion beauty, heart-breaking beauty.”

“The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.”

“Her laugh. The way she smoked before she gave up. Smoke trickling up her nostrils. Spokes of smoke when she spoke.”

“When Julia was twenty-nine, her hair was already bar-coded. Now, at sixty-two, it was a solid helmet of bright pewter, level with her lean, brown jawbone.”