As You Get Older, You Don't Get

For With My Intuition I Knew That This Man Was Repeating A Pattern Over And Over Again: Courting A Woman With His Intelligence And Sympathy, Claiming Her Emotionally; Then, When She Began To Claim In Return, Running Away. And The Better A Woman Was, The Sooner He Would Begin To Run. I Knew This With My Intuition, And Yet I Sat There In My Dark Room, Looking At The Hazed Wet Brilliance Of The Purple London Night Sky, Longing With My Whole Being.

Recently, The Science Fiction Writer Arthur C. Clarke Talked About The Ways The Lives Of Human Beings Will Be Changed In The Next Century. At Least Half Of Them I Didn't Understand At All, Though I'm Sure That Kids Today Would Know Exactly What He Meant. I'm Somewhere In The Past. I Do Think, However, That Our Brains Have Been Damaged By Technology. I Meet Kids Who Don't Seem To Be Capable Of Reading A Long Sentence, Much Less A Long Book.

I Think A Writer's Job Is To Provoke Questions. I Like To Think That If Someone's Read A Book Of Mine, They've Had - I Don't Know What - The Literary Equivalent Of A Shower. Something That Would Start Them Thinking In A Slightly Different Way Perhaps. That's What I Think Writers Are For. This Is What Our Function Is.

It Is Terrible To Destroy A Person's Picture Of Himself In The Interests Of Truth Or Some Other Abstraction.

I Always Hated Tony Blair, From The Beginning.