The hidden spring
Picked up a ten-year-old notebook just now; it's falling apart, as they all are, even the latest. 147 pages of quotations.
On page 53, a line from page 54 of Alberto Angelo by BS Johnson, just reissued: And we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. As though it could make some difference.
And on page 51, a favourite from the afterword to Lolita: I presume there exist readers who find titillating the display of mural words in those hopelessly banal and enormous novels which are typed out by the thumbs of tense mediocrities and called 'powerful' and 'stark' by the reviewing hack.
The final entry is from Virginia Woolf's diaries, 5th October 1923:
It took me a year's groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process. One feels about in a state of misery - indeed I made up my mind one night to abandon the book - and then one touches the hidden spring.
