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I’m not sorry it stopped. [on Lady Gaga’s ”Poker Face”]

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I've never listened to music lying down. Listening's reading if you close your eyes.Music's a wood you walk through.

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In the Belgian backwaters, south of Bruges, there lives a reclusive English composer, named Vyvyan Ayrs. You won’t have heard of him because you’re a ...more

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Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

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But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

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Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to p...more

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The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attentio...more

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Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. "Oy!" yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. "There'...more

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The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.

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Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, obo...more

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Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. ...more

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One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner.

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Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

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Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me...more

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Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.