Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

I walked through backstreets, where housewives put out futons to air, living the same year sixty times.

in Tokyo you have to make your place inside your head.

Some people will tell you about their places straight off, and won’t shut up about it all night. Others keep it hidden like a garden in a mountain forest.

Real things had happened to her to make her how she was, and I wanted to know them, and read them, like a book.

I wanted to say that it’s not America they’re aping, it’s the Japan of their parents that they’re rejecting.

love has got to be based on knowledge, hasn’t it? You have to know someone intimately to be able to love them. So love at first sight is a contradiction in terms. Unless in that first sight there’s some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information from one mind into the other.

There are so many cities in every single city.

‘Lust is the hard sell. Love is the soft sell. The profit margin is exactly the same.’

Italians give their cities sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.

‘If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.