Michael Wood

“In an aside on interviews, García Márquez says that he doesn’t believe in their usefulness, and that he considers the many interviews he has given as belonging to his ‘works of fiction’. This book is perhaps best described as a long interview with himself, but the idea of fantasy gives too much away . . . We are witnessing a triumph of performance, and this is what living to tell the tale means: that what should have been said is part of life too, and there is a real poverty in our forgetting or denying this.”

“This James certainly has his secrets, and likes the idea of secrets. ‘Everyone he knew carried with them the aura of another life which was half secret and half open, to be known about but not mentioned . . .’ He recalls the attraction he felt, when young and in Paris, for Paul Joukowsky, who had invited James to his room. James waits on the street, looking up at Paul’s window, simultaneously knowing he will not go up to the room and storing up memories which will later make him wonder ‘if these hours were not the truest he had ever lived’. This is ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ with a difference: not a life frozen by waiting and denial, but a life haunted by the memory of frightened desire.”

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’

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When asked what I was planning to do on a brief trip to Buenos Aires, my first visit, I said I was going to take the Borges tour. I thought I was joking but soon learned that in Argentina it isn’t easy to be sure of such things. I am sitting in a café which already seems more like the sheer idea of a café than the real thing could quite be. Red velvet chairs and benches,...

“I remember a long argument we had at the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords. The thing went on for about four hours, Edward pacing up and down in his apartment drinking glass after glass of orange juice. I was looking for hope but looking in the wrong place. In the end, I said: ‘But Edward, you’ve got to believe that some day, somehow, things are going to get better.’ He looked at me as if I was mad, and said: ‘Of course I believe that. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t be doing any of this.’”