About Iain Sinclair: Iain Sinclair is a British writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.
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 h...
You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the...
With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio...
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 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...
To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity.
An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.
If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.
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.
The only times I'm not relaxed are when I haven't got a project on the go.
You can't impose a legacy.
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 am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.
What I write, I write. I'll always do it in some form.
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.
Hackney at certain epochs has given itself suburban airs and graces, before being slapped down and consigned once more to the dump bin of aborted ambition.
You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.
Getting comprehensively lost in a car with a full tank of petrol at someone else's expense, you can't beat it.
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....
