We Are A Nation Of 20 Million

Anybody Who Has Ever Tried To Rectify An Injustice Or Set A Record Straight Comes To Feel That He Is Going Mad.

As Subjects, We All Live In Suspense, From Day To Day, From Hour To Hour; In Other Words, We Are The Hero Of Our Own Story. We Cannot Believe That It Is Finished, That We Are 'finished,' Even Though We May Say So; We Expect Another Chapter, Another Installment, Tomorrow Or Next Week.

A Novelist Is An Elephant, But An Elephant Who Must Pretend To Forget.

To Care For The Quarrels Of The Past, To Identify Oneself Passionately With A Cause That Became, Politically Speaking, A Losing Cause With The Birth Of The Modern World, Is To Experience A Kind Of Straining Against Reality, A Rebellious Nonconformity That, Again, Is Rare In America, Where Children Are Instructed In The Virtues Of The System They Live Under, As Though History Had Achieved A Happy Ending In American Civics.

Life Is A System Of Recurrent Pairs, The Poison And The Antidote Being Eternally Packaged Together By Some Considerate Heavenly Druggist.