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"We all suffer from this sense of something undone, unfinished, unfelt. But I’ve become interested in surrender, in letting go of the things I used to grasp after."
"I was hungry for experience as any young writer is, and every young person. I wanted many women, many kinds of experiences, many countries, many climates, many love affairs – I didn’t know it at the time, but it was natural for me at the time to see life as some kind of buffet, you know, where there was a lot of different tastes. I didn’t see it or think about it at the time, but I’d get tired of something and then move on to something else, never terribly happy doing it, leaving one thing for the next because the thing I had didn’t work, whether it was the woman or the poem or the city or whatever it was – it wasn’t working, nothing worked. Until I understood that nothing works. But you know, that took me a lifetime to understand that nothing works and to accept that."
"I know that feeling very well, the feeling of rejection, of being left, nobody escapes that – maybe some people do, but I didn’t, I didn’t. I mean, you can experience it many times a day. The person you’re with is leaving you, even if it’s just for an instant, you know, you can suffer rejection. Even somebody that you’ve been with, and you know he’s going to be there tomorrow, and you just see something in the way he turns away or the way he answers you or a glance, where you know you don’t matter to him in that moment, and that’s intolerable for someone who loves. So we all know those moments, many moments during the day, where we feel threatened, abandoned. Or the contrary when we’re tired of the person, when they’re asking too much, it’s not fun, it’s not interesting, it’s boring and you want to get away – we recognize that. So after a while, when you recognize it, you can sit back a bit, even though you’re caught up in it, there is some distance, and you forgive yourself for feeling that way, and you forgive the other person doing it to you, because you know they’re not doing it to you, it’s just arising and it’s arising in you, so you forgive them and you forgive yourself, you don’t have to blame them and you don’t have to blame yourself."
"...and we got up and I guess we had a cup of coffee or something and got a taxi, and I’ve never forgotten this. Nothing happened, just sitting in the back of the taxi with Marianne, lit a cigarette, a Greek cigarette that had that delicious deep flavor of a Greek cigarette, that has a lot of Turkish tobacco in it, and thinking, I’m an adult. You know. I have a life of my own, I’m an adult, I’m with this beautiful woman, we have a little money in our pocket, we’re going back to Hydra, we’re passing these painted walls. That feeling I think I’ve tried to recreate it hundreds of times unsuccessfully. Just that feeling of being grown up, with somebody beautiful that you’re happy to be beside and all the world is in front of you."
