What Fiction Offers Us Is An Intimacy

As A Bookish Adolescent, I Sopped Up Texts As If I Were Blotting Paper And They Were Fluid.

What Fiction Offers Us Is An Intimacy Shorn Of The Messy Contingencies Of Human Existence - Gender, Race, Class Or Age. Those Moments Of Transcendence When We Exclaim "you Know Exactly What I Mean!" Depend For Much Of Their Force On The Anonymous Character Of The Intimacy Between Writer And Reader.

Regard Yourself As A Small Corporation Of One. Take Yourself Off On Team-building Exercises (long Walks). Hold A Christmas Party Every Year At Which You Stand In The Corner Of Your Writing Room, Shouting Very Loudly To Yourself While Drinking A Bottle Of White Wine. Then Masturbate Under The Desk. The Following Day You Will Feel A Deep And Cohering Sense Of Embarrassment.

Vaughn's Vision Is Older, Wiser And Harder Than Ritchie's.

The Future Continues To Preoccupy Me As A Reliable Source Of Hopes, Fears And Anxieties, But Increasingly The Present Seems To Have No Outstanding Qualities Of Its Own, Being Merely A Way-station Through Which Events Travel To The Vast Shadow Lands Of The Past.