If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of the street, on the roof of a house. It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

Jon McGregor

If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

Jon McGregor

remarkable speech speak

You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

Jon McGregor

eye missing clouds

There are so many people in the world, and I want to know them all but I don’t even know my next-door neighbor’s name.

Jon McGregor

names doors people

I say too much of what, he says too much of everything, too much stuff, too many places, too much information, too many people, too much of things for there to be too much of, there is too much to know and I don't know where to begin but I want to try.

Jon McGregor

want trying people

The whole city stopped - And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.

Jon McGregor

cities complicated world

He says when your grandmother died your mother cried solidly for a week, solidly. She was crying with relief he says, it was like as if a door had been unlocked and she'd been let outside, she said to me I'm safe now. He waits, and he says this kid, when it's born, you mustn't ever let it think it's anything other than a gift and a blessing, do you hear me?

Jon McGregor

blessing mother kids

All the emails I get these days start with sorry but I've been so busy, and I don't understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other.

Jon McGregor

email busy sorry

there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home.

Jon McGregor

laughter eye home

I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.

Jon McGregor

knuckles saws paper

I'm surprised, but I'm glad, I realise that this is what i wanted that night last week, to simply make a connection and keep hold of it.

Jon McGregor

connections lasts night

I wonder how many ways there are for a mother to produce that wreckage in her own daughter, and my muscles tense as I think of them.

Jon McGregor

daughter mother thinking

She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it's in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowoah doowoah.

Jon McGregor

vocabulary wonder past

He thinks about her, at this moment, in her house, a few thin walls away, packing her life into boxes and bags and he wonders what memories she is rediscovering, what thoughts are catching in her mouth like the dust blown from unused textbooks. He wonders if she has buried any traces of herself under her floorboards. He wonders what those traces would be if she had. And he wonders again why he thinks about her so much when he knows so little to think about.

Jon McGregor

wall memories thinking

It is something I recognise in myself. I do eavesdrop. I do people-watch, a lot.

Jon McGregor

recognise watches people

Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.

Jon McGregor

week lasts firsts

Everybodys got their own situation and their own needs.

Jon McGregor

situation needs

It takes a lot of energy and creativity to make such screwed up lives carry on. And the kind of will people have to survive, year after year, dealing with that stuff, is weirdly impressive.

Jon McGregor

creativity people years

People seem to be losing their sense of boundaries more and more, what people are willing to put up on the internet, especially blogs. People seem to assume that only their friends are going to read it but anyone in the world could read it at any time.

Jon McGregor

losing people world

Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating, but a bit embarrassing.

Jon McGregor

embarrassing bits book

It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.

Jon McGregor

myself easy writing book