I Got A Book Token For Christmas

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.

I Was Born In Norwich In 1946, And Educated In England, Zimbabwe, And Australia, Before My Family Settled In North Wales.

Children Are Not Less Intelligent Than Adults; What They Are Is Less Informed.

Tolkien Seems To Me Reactionary, Conservative, Fearful Of A Modern World. Fearful Of Anything That Isn't Sanctioned By The Passage Of Long Eons Of Time. I Think What I'm Doing In His Dark Materials Is Politically The Reverse Of That.

I Stopped Believing There Was A Power Of Good And A Power Of Evil That Were Outside Us. And I Came To Believe That Good And Evil Are Names For What People Do, Not For What They Are.