Very Bright Teeth As Big And Orderly

A Writer Is Dreamed And Transfigured Into Being By Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Silhouettes Of Trees, Boxes Of Fairy Tales Dropped In The Mud, Uncles' And Cousins' Books, Tablets And Capsules And Powders...and Then One Day You Find Yourself Leaning Here, Writing On That Round Glass Table Salvaged From The Park View Pharmacy--writing This, An Impossibility, A Summary Of Who You Came To Be Where You Are Now, And Where, God Knows, Is That?

Literature Is An Instrument Of A Culture, Not A Summary Of It.

In The Compact Between Novelist And Reader, The Novelist Promises To Lie, And The Reader Promises To Allow It.

In Real Life Wishing, Divorced From Willing, Is Sterile And Begets Nothing.

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.