Anything That Happens To You Has Some

When I Was A Kid I Used To Tell Myself The Moon Was A Silver Gong And If I Could Climb High Enough To Beat On It With Both Hands All My Wishes Would Come True.

The Fascinating Thing To A Dispassionate Observer About The Structure Of Life In The Soviet Union Is That In Their Efforts To Produce An Unknown That We May Let Its Ideologists Call Socialism The Communist Dictators Have Produced A Brutal Approximation Of Monopoly Capitalism, A System That Has All The Disadvantages Of Our Own, With None Of The Palliatives Which Come To Us From Surviving Competition And From The Essential Division Of Economic And Political Power Which Has So Far Made It Possible For The Humane Traditions Of The Western World To Continue.

The Only Excuse For A Novelist, Aside From The Entertainment And Vicarious Living His Books Give The People Who Read Them, Is As A Sort Of Second-class Historian Of The Age He Lives In. The "reality" He Missed By Writing About Imaginary People, He Gains By Being Able To Build A Reality More Nearly Out Of His Own Factual Experience Than A Plain Historian Or Biographer Can.

Every Generation Rewrites The Past. In Easy Times History Is More Or Less Of An Ornamental Art, But In Times Of Danger We Are Driven To The Written Record By A Pressing Need To Find Answers To The Riddles Of Today.... In Times Of Change And Danger When There Is A Quicksand Of Fear Under Men's Reasoning, A Sense Of Continuity With Generations Gone Before Can Stretch Like A Lifeline Across The Scary Present And Get Us Past That Idiot Delusion Of The Exceptional Now That Blocks Good Thinking.

Great Works Of The Imagination Are Not Produced Quickly Nor Do They Take Quick Effect On The Popular Mind.