Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've never been baptised.
I don't believe in sexual love.
My favourite tea is lapsang souchong.
I'm more a dog person than a cat person.
I never went to church as a child. I did not .
I've drifted in and out of vegetarianism for years.
I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.
People didn't talk about paedophiles in the seventies, I don't think.
I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.
The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.
I was born in the seventies, age of bad haircuts and grainy colour photos.
There's a strong aspect of Buddhism which is geared towards ending all fertility.
The imagination is fertile. From seeds of the imagination, much is made manifest.
I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility.
I did not understand the differences between Catholic and Protestant until I was an adult.
I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.
[My muse] feels nostalgic for Japan, and, perhaps strangely, for the pioneer days of America.
I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.
I went for a walk in the rain. Recently, whenever it rains, I feel like I want to go for a walk.
You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.
Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.
This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write.
To me the seventies represent normality, and, of course, it is a normality that is now anachronistic.
If there is innocence on Earth again, I tend to imagine it in more [Henry David]Thoreau sort of terms.
The peculiar thing is that, in focusing only on the here and now, Buddhism seems to despise the world.
In terms of what is expressed, antinatalism is a strong presence, not always explicit, in what I write.
On the other hand, the seventies were drab. That is, I am utterly fascinated by the fifties and sixties.
People may wish to say that the thing that is in conflict with my creativity is not Buddhism - that's fine.
I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.
In the meditation, of course, the question is repeated and repeated until you run out of answers - or so I hear.
If we do want to do that [ colonise space to survive, ], then vacuous materialism is not going to be enough for us.
I would say that, apart from being a writer, I have also always been very conscious of the idea of a 'world elsewhere'.
I associate my childhood with two things, mainly: the North Devon countryside and a sense of connection to another world.
I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.
I grew up in North Devon, by the sea, and feel a special affinity for the landscape there, despite a lack of actual ancestry.
Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.
Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.
It's interesting, the sense of pastoral utopia that exists in so much fantasy - in [Edward ] Dunsany, [John R.R.] Tolkien and so on.
1977 was also, of course, the year that Derek Jarman made his iconoclastic film Jubilee, which was so much part of the punk movement.
I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.
I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space."
We all know about the car breaking down on a deserted road scenario. That's cliché. I'm thinking more of Cider with Rosie, as in, the dark side.
I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.
Lots of things were there [in the seventies], in the social experience, but not quite named, lurking like a stranger on the edge of the playground.
The cultural products of America from this period [ fifties and sixties] are like a vision of paradise or something. I find it utterly intoxicating.
Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.
I seem to be less depressed but also less hopeful now in my thirties. My widow's peak bothers me. I think a lot about the end of the human race. And so on.
I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.
It would be hard to say that exactly, but antinatalism is a reality in my life, not just an interesting idea. I can feel it in the chilled and weary marrow of my bones.
If we do overcome linear time, I would hope this means dwelling more directly in the fertility of the imagination rather than denying it, as some aspects of Buddhism seem to.