Lee Was Too Cool By Nature To

I Feel With Some Passion That What We Truly Are Is Private, And Almost Infinitely Complex, And Ambiguous, And Both External And Internal, And Double- Or Triple- Or Multiply Natured, And Largely Mysterious Even To Ourselves; And Furthermore That What We Are Is Only Part Of Us, Because Identity, Unlike "identity", Must Include What We Do. And I Think That To Find Oneself And Every Aspect Of This Complexity Reduced In The Public Mind To One Property That Apparently Subsumes All The Rest ("gay", "black", "muslim", Whatever) Is To Be The Victim Of A Piece Of Extraordinary Intellectual Vulgarity.

For A Long Time I Thought I Was A Poet, But That's A High Title To Claim.

All The Stories Of The Bible That I Know Came To Me First From My Grandfather's Lips... He Would See Stories In Everything. He Told Stories Very Easily And Very Generously, So I Loved Him For That. He Was A Simple Man, A Victorian; He Was Born In 1890-something. He Saw No Reason And Had Never Seen Any Reason To Question His Christian Faith. His Faith Was Strong And Simple And That's It. And I, Like His Other Grandchildren And The Children In His Parish, Sheltered Underneath It.

A Lot Of Modernism Does Seem To Come Out Of A Fear Of Being Thought An Ordinary Storyteller. So They Tell It Backwards And They Tell It In The Present Tense And They Cut Loose The Pages And Shuffle Them Around - All That Kind Of Stuff.

It's Not My Business To Remedy Deaths! It's My Business To Tell Stories. Lyra And The Other Heroines Didn't Come With Placards Saying, "make This A Feminist Story!" I'm Glad People Enjoy Seeing A Female Protagonist In A Big Adventure Story, But I Didn't Do It For Political Reasons.