I don’t know how to exactly say this, and please don’t misunderstand it, but since Arthur died I have been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. It was as if the experience of grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt

It’s that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity.

We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time,

We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time – that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty

A promise that the intimations of the presence of those who have passed away are more than just mere wishful thinking.

And, well, the truth of it is that Arthur’s passing ultimately became a motivating force, so that, over the years, Susie and I have experienced some very beautiful, meaningful things in our lives, truly beautiful, meaningful things, and in many ways they lead like a powder trail directly back to Arthur’s death. This is the secret, terrible beauty

Hope is optimism with a broken heart.

suspect that for me the world is enlivened by the creative process. It enhances the way I see things and makes the world feel sufficient, even abundant. Without creative engagement in the world, without contributing to the spirit of the world, I think I would start to feel a bit like an onlooker or something. But maybe that would be enough, just to

Yes, that’s right: creativity and a sense of shared defiance. Nicely put. Susie and I are essentially bound together by love and catastrophe, but there is also the shared project of grief: we both understand what we are going through, and we know how to tread lightly around it and to keep each other afloat.