The Old Knowledge Had Been Difficult But

All Knowledge Is Partial, Infinitesimally Partial. Reason Is A Net Thrown Out Into An Ocean. What Truth It Brings In Is A Fragment, A Glimpse, A Scintillation Of The Whole Truth.

Genre Fiction Was Looked At As A Ghetto, But I Wonder Now If Realist Fiction, Sealing Itself Off In The Glum Suburbs Of A Dysfunctional Society, Denying The Use Of Imagination, Was The Ghetto.

One Voice Speaking Truth Is A Greater Force Than Fleets And Armies.

There Was One Person Who Greatly And Directly Benefited My Career--my Agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 To The Late Nineties She Represented All My Work, In Every Field Except Poetry. I Could Send Her An Utterly Indescribable Story, And She'd Sell It To Playboy Or The Harvard Law Review Or Weird Tales Or The New Yorker--she Knew Where To Take It. She Never Told Me What To Write Or Not Write, She Never Told Me, That Won't Sell, And She Never Meddled With My Prose.

By Such Literalism, Fundamentalism, Religions Betrayed The Best Intentions Of Their Founders. Reducing Thought To Formula, Replacing Choice By Obedience, These Preachers Turned The Living Word Into Dead Law.