A Short Story Is A Shard, A

There's A Flip Side To Having Prominent Public Intellectuals, Which Is That They Start Meddling In Politics And Often With Quite Disastrous Results.

If The Government Announced That It Was Going To Allocate A Vast Tranche Of Education Funding Purely To The Pupils At The Best Public Schools, There Would Be A National Outcry - And Yet This Is Precisely What The Olympics Represents In Terms Of Sports Funding.

If You Believe Something, You Can Have A Morality That Means Something As Well. You Can Feel Recognized As An Individual Within The Universe; It Can Give Meaning To Who You Are.

Whenever I Produce My Best Work, It's Always Because I've Spent Time Being Idle. Something Always Emerges After Nothing.

What Fiction Offers Us Is An Intimacy Shorn Of The Messy Contingencies Of Human Existence - Gender, Race, Class Or Age. Those Moments Of Transcendence When We Exclaim "you Know Exactly What I Mean!" Depend For Much Of Their Force On The Anonymous Character Of The Intimacy Between Writer And Reader.