I Was No Good At Being A

What Literature Can And Should Do Is Change The People Who Teach The People Who Don't Read The Books.

For My True Thoughts Have Spent More Time In Your Company Than In Anyone Else's, These Last Two Or Three Months, And Where My Thoughts Are, There Am I, In Truth".

On Buses And Trains, I Always Think About The Inexhaustible Variety Of Human Genes. We See Types, And Occasionally Twins, But Never Doubles. All Faces Are Unique, And This Is Exhilarating, Despite The Increasingly Plastic Similarity Of Tv Stars And Actors.

Narration Is As Much A Part Of Human Nature As Breath And The Circulation Of The Blood.... Storytelling Is Intrinsic To Biological Time, Which We Cannot Escape. Life, Pascal Said, Is Like Living In A Prison From Which Every Day Fellow Prisoners Are Taken Away To Be Executed. We Are All, Like Scheherazade, Under Sentence Of Death, And We All Think Of Our Lives As Narratives, With Beginnings, Middles And Ends.

Pain Hardens, And Great Pain Hardens Greatly, Whatever The Comforters Say, And Suffering Does Not Ennoble, Though It May Occasionally Lend A Certain Rigid Dignity Of Manner To The Suffering Frame.