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The phenomenal world, which didn’t mean good, did it? Just meant things as they happened.

The process had felt like a surrender to my own ugliness. It was the same ugliness in proximity to M that I had noted at the beginning, the ugliness of experience.

Living inside someone else had helped me, I said.

Perhaps reality had not yet been sufficiently falsified for its retrieval to seem worth it.

The interviewer asks her whether she thinks that she has power. She is a little disappointed with this question: it is what people always want to know. But then it seems that it might in fact be a different question. Is he asking whether she realises how truly powerless she is?

We men are generally afraid of anyone finding out that we were ever boys, he says. It wasn’t like that for girls, she says. If you didn’t start early you missed your chance.

It is as though we no longer love ourselves. Can it be true that work, in the end, has proved more lasting than love? Or is it that work, without us realising it, has somehow interfered with our capacity to love?

Like several other kinds of work ours involves performance. It involves doing something in the right way at the right time. It involves co-ordination. Where we know ourselves to be lucky is in the degree of individuality we are allowed – or expected – to bring to this performance. This permission or expectation is what we have earned.

.. people now are more self-aware. The writer appears to believe, as many people do, that selfishness is directly linked to talent, but M is not convinced of this. She is unable to see selfishness as anything other than the product of stupidity. It is true that even the most talented people can be stupid in this way. But in her heart she thinks the less of them.

It is the exaggeration of her identity that causes these occasional plunges into horror, as though she had inadvertently stepped into a vacuum that exists somewhere in herself. Patiently, step by step, she reminds herself who she is and how it is she came to be here. The future with its shifting ground is not her concern.

..the sight of her starts to register; people begin to see her, as though she were an image developing out of their own knowledge. She sometimes wonders whether it is she who needs this process to occur. The unimaginable strangeness of not being known, even if it is the violent half-knowledge of someone on the street looking at her..

We would like to observe without memory.

..we have come to understand that our memories are meaningless. They are the trick that life has played on us. Only the memory of violence has any purpose, if it enables us to recognise violence again when it comes.

In the absence of simulation, he says to M, the theatre actor has to really live. If his character dies, he has in some real sense to die every night. The obscenity of film, he says, is the obscenity of simulation.

We are not looking for change. We do not, as we did when we were young, see the evening as a mysterious kingdom in which we might meet our destiny. We do not invest our hopes in the unknown. Since we ourselves are known, the unknown no longer promises us anything. We would have to become unknown again ourselves in order to receive it.

M’s personal task is to become real, or rather to acquire some reality, but often – when talking to her friend, for instance – she is relieved not to have to take this task entirely seriously.

We feel there is no one in the whole world we could trust like that, no one who could dress us, no one who could make us disappear.

Fame is perhaps this tower, an ultimate entrapment in the self that is also a deliverance from it.

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We have all decided to live somewhere we don’t belong. The people who do belong here may wonder why we made that choice. We have been freer to choose than most people are. But is the truth, in fact, that we don’t really belong anywhere?

For a while it runs free, it runs and runs in search of something, but in the end there is nowhere else for it to go but back home.

It might be said that creative people were people whose childhoods hadn’t ended. There was no particular basis for thinking this, other than the fact that most children created things and most adults didn’t. In a way it was terrible, the idea that childhood might not end. Being a creator was like being a dog that keeps running away from its violent master.

M said she did not consider herself to be an artist. She saw herself as merely an element in the creations of others. She did not possess the tal power of choice that a creator has. She had acquired some of that power later, through fame. She was using it not to create but to try to make her life seem more normal.

The reduction of the element of time relative to that of space created a moral imbalance that was also a liberating convenience. Reading books did not make life easier in the same way. It took time to read a book. Watching a film temporarily broke the power of time.

Watching a film was a means of surrendering control over what could not in any case be controlled.

Being able to do what I wanted made me afraid that I had never done what I wanted.

Even in the best films things were made to seem more possible than they actually were, especially cruelty. The possibility of cruelty was nearly always present in films. It was as if, in films, people could do whatever they wanted and were simply choosing not to for now. It was as if there was no law.

A film is also always happening; its origins in time have been frozen through the process of recording. M could always be found in her films, living the same instants over and over.

It was hard not to feel ugly next to M. Part of it was the ugliness of experience. I had never learned how to make experience easier for myself. For M it was the reverse. Her difficulty lay in her distance from the random violence of insignificance. Personally I felt saturated with that violence. All my life it had been made clear to me how unimportant I was.

My mother was the only person who knew which of my memories were true and which were my own creation. If I could go back, I’d skip past my childhood and go to hers. Spend one day with the girl she was before her mother left her. Witness her happiness. Braid her hair. Remember everything.