Scenery Can Be A Violent Stimulant.

What Really Annoys Me Are The Ones Who Write To Say, I Am Doing Your Book For My Final Examinations And Could You Please Tell Me What The Meaning Of It Is. I Find It Just So Staggering--that You're Supposed To Explain The Meaning Of Your Book To Some Total Stranger! If I Knew What The Meanings Of My Books Were, I Wouldn't Have Bothered To Write Them.

Auntie Phyl's Last Months In The Care Home Were Extra Pieces. Age Is Unnecessary. Some Of Us, Like My Mother, Are Fortunate Enough To Die Swiftly And Suddenly, In Full Possession Of Our Faculties And Our Fate, But More And More Of Us Will Be Condemned To Linger, At The Mercy Of Anxious Or Indifferent Relatives, Careless Strangers, Unwanted Medical Interventions, Increasing Debility, Incontinence, Memory Loss. We Live Too Long, But, Like The Sibyl Hanging In Her Basket In The Cave At Cumae, We Find It Hard To Die.

The Middle Years, Caught Between Children And Parents, Free Of Neither: The Past Stretches Back Too Densely, It Is Too Thickly Populated, The Future Has Not Yet Thinned Out.

Men And Women Can Never Be Close. They Can Hardly Speak To One Another In The Same Language. But Are Compelled, Forever, To Try, And Therefore Even In Defeat There Is No Peace.

There Would Be More Genuine Rejoicing At The Discovery Of A Complete New Novel By Jane Austen Than Any Other Literary Discovery, Short Of A New Major Play By Shakespeare.