Iain Sinclair Quotes

Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren't seagulls.

The only times I'm not relaxed are when I haven't got a project on the go.

Light is all memory.

You'd better make it your business to understand the market. The ability to charm or play the game is useful.

To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity.

I don't feel proprietary, but I do feel there is a human identity to the borough of Hackney that's quite peculiar. It was always bloody-minded and difficult; it always stood up to central government.

The negotiation of city space has been made more difficult with the idea that redevelopment is an improvement for some vague future - but it's never like that, is it? Once you get there, for economic reasons you have to generate the next project - so you're immediately starting to dig up something else, and so it goes on.

It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.

For the bookish, London is a book. For criminals, a map of opportunities. For unpapered immigrants, it is a nest of skinned eyes; sanctioned gunmen ready to blow your head off as you run for a train. When the city of distorting mirrors revealed itself, through its districts and discriminations, I discovered more about London's past as a reworking of my own submerged history.

There is an obvious connection, on the declining Roman empire's bread and circuses model, between political enthusiasm for public spectacles and the periods when we are least able to pay for them.

What I write, I write. I'll always do it in some form.

For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you're a mass observer and you can't afford to care whether people are busy or not. You're a witness.

I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account - the presences that they created, or "figures" if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew's Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence.
The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic.

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral.

The faster we walk, the more ground we lose.

If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.

I was gazing back in the direction of Wales, watching the Prudence clone, when I noticed a couple of drunks lurching in my direction. Night people who live in service stations. The insufficiently deceased.

An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else's expense, you can't beat it.

You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.

The suicide hour of cold coffee and alien voices on the radio.

As you become known, the demands on you are such that you get less and less time to do the things you want to do. But if there are no demands, then that means nobody wants to read what you're doing anyway, so you're stuck.

Men of the cloth live in this monologue, it is their due: nobody talks back to a pulpit.

All kinds of weird stuff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke.

Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He's not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn't a beard; it's a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. 'Customer satisfaction,' says the brochure. 'Seamless integration.' 'Comprehensive upgrade.' Of what? I want to scream. 'Solutions provider.' Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked.
A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: 'You're always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.' Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not.

I looked at this first sheet, words scribbled confidently on a lined pad. My attempt at making contact the spirit of Llandor. Disaster. I couldn't do the language or locate the period. The pad of paper, with its grey-mauve rules, was all wrong. It was intended for meaningful work, figures, calculations, notes.

The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.

The kind of world I'm endlessly going on about is pretty well doomed, but nevertheless I think there are recesses of it worth celebrating.