Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSLis a Welsh writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth11 June 1943
house leave
You can't leave the thing that you are, the house that has become your biography.
What I write, I write. I'll always do it in some form.
bin dump given itself suburban
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.
The only times I'm not relaxed are when I haven't got a project on the go.
future
To try to fix the future is a manifest absurdity.
gradually people telling
If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.
declining enthusiasm obvious pay periods public roman spectacles
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.
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.
central government human quite stood
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.
difficult dig economic future generate goes improvement next project reasons starting vague
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.
expanding family presents property stays
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 neurosis? Have you no imagination?
crumbling sync
I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.
disappears 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.
change happened necessary quite
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.