To Look At Ourselves From Afar, To

It Is A Bizarre Thought That In This [u.s. 2008] Presidential Cycle We Could Have Had A Woman In The White House We Might Have A Black Man In The White House But If Either Of Them Had Said They Were Atheists Neither Of Them Would Have Had A Hope In Hell.

You Can Put It Another Way, Of Course; You Always Can.

When You Read A Great Book, You Don’t Escape From Life, You Plunge Deeper Into It. There May Be A Superficial Escape – Into Different Countries, Mores, Speech Patterns – But What You Are Essentially Doing Is Furthering Your Understanding Of Life’s Subtleties, Paradoxes, Joys, Pains And Truths. Reading And Life Are Not Separate But Symbiotic.

You Can't Have A Novel Without Real, Believable People, And Once You Get Into Either Too Theoretical A Novel Or Too Philosophical A Novel, You Get Into The Dangers That The French Novel Has Discovered In The Past 50 Or 60 Years. And You Get Into A Sort Of Aridity. No, You Have To Have Real, Identifiable People To Whom The Reader Reacts In A Way As If They Were Real People.

Iconic Paris Tells Us: Here Are Our Three-star Attractions, Go Thou And Marvel. And So We Gaze Obediently At What We Are Told To Gaze At, Without Exactly Asking Why.