Benjamin Markovits

‘A year passed before I could pick up a ball again with pleasure.’

Hari Kunzru

‘Writer: How do we get back? Stalker: Here, nobody returns.’

Adam Foulds

‘There are two options for the young writer and employment. There is the proper job, whatever it might be – law, advertising, medicine or the default choice for many, academia. Or there’s the menial, rent-paying job.’

Gavin Francis

‘I came to the Himalayas not because of a dream of mountains or of animals, but because of a map.’

Patrick French

‘In Edwardian days, if you were growing up in England (though Maurice was from Ireland) your life was regimented.’

Salman Rushdie

‘You open a book by a writer you’ve never heard of and a new voice leaps off the page and makes you listen.’

Issue 124

Siddartha Mukherjee

‘The point of lucid death,’ he said, ‘is to retain the consciousness of dying, while blunting the agony of it.’

Andrés Felipe Solano

‘During the hottest months, the thermometer settles in at 100 degrees like a nonagenarian in a rocker – no one can make it move.’

Issue 124

Sonia Faleiro

A.L. Kennedy

‘I have never seen anyone eat figs in the street and feel I am unsurprised.’

Paul Auster

‘You can’t remember the precise moment when you understood that you were a Jew.’

An essay by Paul Auster.

Mary Ruefle

‘I wasn’t bored, I was relaxed, and, I suppose, happy (I’ve never been able to figure out how happiness feels).’

Julia Rochester

‘He repeatedly said, “I should have been a priest.“ He was right. People sought his benediction.’

Joanna Kavenna

‘Rooms jaundiced by bad lighting, so you wondered, what is ague, and could we have it? Rooms that hummed, a hum you couldn’t quite identify, or that seemed in the end to come from your own head.’