I Don't Believe In God, But I

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.

He Had A Better Mind And A More Rigorous Temperament Than Me; He Thought Logically, And Then Acted On The Conclusion Of Logical Thought. Whereas Most Of Us, I Suspect, Do The Opposite: We Make An Instinctive Decision, Then Build Up An Infrastructure Of Reasoning To Justify It. And Call The Result Common Sense.

We Live In Time, It Bounds Us And Defines Us, And Time Is Supposed To Measure History, Isn't It? But If We Can't Understand Time, Can't Grasp Its Mysteries Of Pace And Progress, What Chance Do We Have With History--even Our Own Small, Personal, Largely Undocumented Piece Of It?

When You Are Young, You Think That The Old Lament The Deterioration Of Life Because This Makes It Easier For Them To Die Without Regret. When You Are Old, You Become Impatient With The Way In Which The Young Applaud The Most Insignificant Improvements … While Remaining Heedless Of The World’s Barbarism. I Don’t Say Things Have Got Worse; I Merely Say The Young Wouldn’t Notice If They Had. The Old Times Were Good Because Then We Were Young, And Ignorant Of How Ignorant The Young Can Be.

Very Few Of My Characters Are Based On People I've Known. It Is Too Constricting.