Does History Repeat Itself, The First Time

Reading And Life Are Not Separate But Symbiotic. And For This Serious Task Of Imaginative Discovery And Self-discovery, There Is And Remains One Perfect Symbol: The Printed Book.

The Better You Know Someone, The Less Well You Often See Them (and The Less Well They Can Therefore Be Transferred Into Fiction). They May Be So Close As To Be Out Of Focus, And There Is No Operating Novelist To Dispel The Blur.

Do We Tend To Recall The Most Important Parts Of A Novel Or Those That Speak Most Directly To Us, The Truest Lines Or The Flashiest Ones?

I Have At Times Tried To Imagine The Despair Which Leads To Suicide, Attempted To Conjure Up The Slew And Slop Of Darkness In Which Only Death Appears As A Pinprick Of Light: In Other Words, The Exact Opposite Of The Normal Condition Of Life.

History Isn't What Happened, History Is Just What Historians Tell Us.