Make me strong enough to bear the loneliness (30th June 1997)

Make me strong enough to bear the loneliness, endure my writing life with no one to share it with. 

I know this morphine (this composure) is a painkiller not a cure. The disease is still there, but it’s better to have the painkiller than the pain. The disease I believe is incurable. So I will need this morphine forever. I am now finding more and better strains of it. Morphine rather than pain. Composure rather than decomposure. Voluptuous luxuries rather than black emptiness. Composure and morality, as long as people don’t get too close, then I have to go on the defensive to keep them out. 

No one is going to deflect me from my path, to the hanging gardens of Babylon, my Swiss bank vaults.

Only a week to go then we're out of June! (25th June 1997)

Only a week to go, then we're out of June! Yesterday was the darkest, stormiest, rainiest day I can remember. I can't remember the last time it rained so much. This is the rainiest week I can remember. This time next week we'll be into July. Then we'll be counting down to August 6th. In February/March 1991 I grew so much, and progressed so much, having been held back for a year. I was held back for 6 months at the Post Office. 

"Rayfield reveals Chekhov as a Don Juan, promiscuous and ferociously unwilling to allow further intimacy after sex. Since he was very attractive to women and moved in advanced Bohemian circles, there were not a few cast-off women in distress whom he repulsed and kept at bay by teasing. He also used their painful experiences as material for his plays. Not only this: from the age of 13 he frequented brothels, and liked to boast to his men friends about the exotic prostitutes he used, dusky-skinned, Japanese and French. Writers are complicated beasts. Chekhov needed privacy and freedom more than he wanted loving intimacy with sexual partners. Out of this privacy came the great stories and plays. How do we measure the sufferings of the women he hurt and abused against his greatness?"

It's like a submarine deep under the sea under the terrible pressure (30th May 1997)

It's like a submarine deep under the sea under the terrible pressure, and you suggest opening the hatches. Then I sink and drown.

Autistic people live in their narrow blackened world, their very narrow range. Keep their eyes to themselves, their personalities locked inside. They are perfectly intelligent but it is a flat gramophone record. Most people's intelligence is in a round globe. Because normal people have got fingers, you're presuming I've got fingers too. 

Writing is expelling the poison from your body. Otherwise you will poison yourself. You have all these suitcases filled with mud, and you have to carry them round everywhere with you, in case there are still some specks of gold in there you've missed. 

I'm blinkered. I can't break out of the 2 dimensions to think in 3 dimensions. I can't make that leap to a globe, that can only happen in the first 3 months. That split second sudden mystical inflation.

"The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently" (9th May 1997)

"The fact remains that the four greatest novelists the world has ever known, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, wrote their respective languages very indifferently. It proves that if you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and if you have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write." "'You want strength, novelty, compactness, intensity of interest, a single vivid impression left upon the mind. Poe is the master of all.'" 

"The detective stories were 'admirable...so wonderful in their masterful force, their reticence, their quick dramatic point'". 

"When Doyle was enthusiastic about a subject it did not have to make sense, and he did not bother to follow it through and weld a story into a logically coherent whole. In a sense, he is the precursor of the children's serials of the 1930s cinema, in which each episode ends on a question mark. How the problem is resolved is of no consequence, provided that it is; he was a victim of the serial-writing habit in which impetus is all."

Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook 

“Love for Proust is agonising jealousy" (21st Jan 1997)

“Love, for Proust, is agonising jealousy; there is no room for fondness or companionship. Finally, there is disillusion and indifference, and the sorrow felt by Swann when he realises he has wasted his life pining for a woman he doesn’t even like. 

The narrator sees a poetic vision of beauty and elegance, the Guermantes and their friends framed in a box at the theatre, glistening with jewels and unattainable glamour, but already ironic laughter is not far away. When he meets them, and is invited to dinner, he soon discovers the distressing banality of the world of the rich and nobly born. It is one more disillusion. Even the celebrated wit of the Duchess herself is simply paradox spiced with malice. 

The third occasion the narrator is projected into lost time is when he treads on a loose cobblestone in a Paris courtyard. He finds himself in St Mark’s, walking on the uneven marble floor. Venice, for him, is art. Unlike love, or Paris society, art never disappoints, or disillusions. He knows he has within him a work of art waiting to be written. After one last party with his friends grown old and wrinkled, where he finds the grandees, formerly so exclusive, married to the very people they refused to receive, he shuts himself up and works until his dying day.” 

I’ve worked really hard in this month of January; no time for anything else. 

“Pinter’s silence is due to fear. Fear of being known. Fear of knowing other people. Fear of intimacy. Silence to protect ourselves.”

It was a shame the Carnival Strip club finished before I perfected my wanking technique (11th August 1997, Vienna)

It was a shame the Carnival Strip club finished before I perfected my wanking technique. It was the perfect place for it. Pornography and writing, that has been my year. This would be my whole life, if I had the chance. The blonde Sharon in white-ribbed minidress.

Very dark and stormy (4th August 1997, Vienna)

Very dark and stormy. Leave it till 12:30, then decide. I do want to look at Maxim, etc. But I just don't want to go out yet! Can't I stay in hibernation for another 4 weeks? I will only miss one round of films.
I'm a Grafologist. My area of study is myself. An endlessly fascinating study it is, too.
If I want to spend my life going to Aphrodite, Sphynx, floozie, what's wrong with that, and writing my little stories. When the money runs out, fine, go back to work for another six months, to earn some more. That six months at the Post Office has brought me twelve months of complete privacy and freedom. It's fantastic. Write to the Post Office again in October.
Aphrodite is only good in winter, when you can spend the whole day up there, when it becomes my private kingdom, when you can leave Aphrodite and go on to floozie, or on to Sphynx. I can't wait for September now. Four weeks. This long August begins now.
All I need is pen & paper, and some plants.