Prepare yourself, Beloved, for I shall rain down on you. But first, prepare the way with sacrifices, prayers, and invocations: I am a coquette and demand your attention. Pray to see the winds lash the sea, pray for ash, for fire, for cracks in the earth, pray with devout enthusiasm for hail and loss! Even now, the dark cloud descends. Drink human blood from my cup. I will show you what I have concealed within my womb. I will show you all these, and you will ride the dark waves on a rudderless ship.

All day long you gather your tribe with your eyelashes and your sweet words. As the day ends, you are tired and alone. Your mood descends: you despise your empty virtuosity. Then it somehow comes to pass that you are absorbed in vivid thought. This is something very different to your daylight persona. You begin to create.

Somewhat self-contained and remote, one senses that there are large gaps between his thoughts. People take great interest in those thoughts of his, but I take even greater interest in the gaps.

What happens after your death is not your concern.

Your bliss is to accrue plaudits and to see your shining face reflected in the eyes of strangers. My bliss is to walk through immersive silence in the streets and parks. You hope to realise your bliss some day. I know my bliss already.

Like all truly great public performers, he had the gestural and verbal style of an alcoholic.

Now that I am incapable of profound thoughts, or even complex deductions, I dream of meeting and falling in love with an equally unambitious woman, and living a life of mild anonymity in the suburbs, just getting to know the neighbours and not thinking of travel too much. I want to talk about food, beer, sport and domestic repairs. I want to work hard all day and come home tired. I want to greet my wife and children every afternoon and just love them, and be loved in return. So private is this sunny fantasy that it has the cast and character of a sinister perversion: a disembowelling of character in the honeyed sunlight.

You hang around with people obviously less articulate than you, I said. Is this because you want to feel superior? She replied: I hang around with people who see before they think. This talent is more common among the inarticulate. As for those rare folk who are both articulate and clear-eyed, one can spot them easily because they love nonsense.

She said to me, not only do you not need a teacher: you cannot get it with a teacher. I asked, what about a teacher who teaches that you cannot get it with a teacher? She replied, you cannot get it with any teacher, no matter what they teach. I said, why then should I listen to you? She said, why then should you listen to me?

Never having had the attention of your father, except when he was angry, you have come to equate love with violence. So, you sought a man who would dominate you. Instead, you found a man who simply loved all the things you did. You became frustrated: he didn't hit you - didn't he love you? But something in you persevered. Soon, you found this man was discoursing with a man inside you: they had each other's eyes. You wielded the energy of method and began to walk with confidence, rather like a man yourself. This was your birthright.

Honouring causality and honouring one's mother and father are, ultimately, the same thing.

I dreamed that the floor split open with a thunderous crack, revealing a red light, through which the head of a reptilian hell being emerged. ‘What is your name?’ I asked. ‘I am Derongi’, the being replied. ‘You brought me here by synchronizing sound and vision.’

Some jump off the cliff, but most are pushed. They fall through hot and cold realms. They meet Madness, and see that he has penetrated them like a tick. They address the worm. The real work begins.

There is no theatre without the Scarlet Woman. Last night, I met her in a dream: she was dressed as a business woman and her name was Savannah. She wore a tailored dark blue suit. She was extremely beautiful. We kissed. She told me she was thirty-nine, but later I found out she also posed as an older woman; in fact, it transpired that she had had at least two identities, and many former lovers. I met one of them near a stone fountain, an amiable, well dressed man in his early thirties, who since ceasing to be her lover, had become her friend. We talked about her, admiringly, for an hour or two, as darkness fell over the stone boulevard.

There are two kinds of philosopher: those who disappear when you stub your toe and those who don't.