Transit

‘It’s hard not to become self-satisfied,’ he said, ‘with so much self-satisfaction around you.’

when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganise himself. And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you’d got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you

language was a weapon, a first line of defence – he might not be brave, but he’d certainly answer to bitchy.

you can’t behave without inhibition. You can go to the ends of the earth but if you meet someone there who knows your name, you might as well have stayed at home.

When he wrote his book, he said, what he desired was to express himself in a way that was free of shame. One source of that shame was other people’s knowledge of him: yet what they knew was not the truth. The truth, he realised, was something he assiduously hid from others. When he wrote his book it was this desire to be free of shame that drove him on. He wrote it in the belief that he was addressing someone who didn’t know him at all, and who therefore he didn’t have to be embarrassed in front of. That person was effectively himself.

the problem with being honest, he said, is that you’re slow to realise that other people can lie

It’s funny,’ he said, ‘how when parents do things to their children, it’s as if they think no one can see them. It’s as if the child is an extension of them: when they talk to it, they’re talking to themselves; when they love it, they’re loving themselves; when they hate it, it’s their own self they’re hating. You never know what’s coming next, because whatever it is, it’s coming out of them not you, even if they blame it on you afterwards. Yet you start to think it did come out of you – you can’t help it.’

small and now we’re making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.

are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were

If this is my moment in the sun, I intend to gorge on it.’