When You Read A Great Book, You

Well, To Be Honest I Think I Tell Less Truth When I Write Journalism Than When I Write Fiction.

The Greatest Patriotism Is To Tell Your Country When It Is Behaving Dishonorably, Foolishly, Viciously.

When I Was Still Quite Young I Had A Complete Presentiment Of Life. It Was Like The Nauseating Smell Of Cooking Escaping From A Ventilator: You Don't Have To Have Eaten It To Know That It Would Make You Throw Up.

We Live On The Flat, On The Level, And Yet - And So - We Aspire. Groundlings, We Can Sometimes Reach As Far As The Gods. Some Soar With Art, Others With Religion; Most With Love. But When We Soar, We Can Also Crash. There Are Few Soft Landings. We May Find Ourselves Bouncing Across The Ground With Leg-fracting Force, Dragged Towards Some Foreign Railway Line. Every Love Story Is A Potential Grief Story. If Not At First, Then Later. If Not For One, Then For The Other. Sometimes, For Both.

I'm Interested In Such Things As The Difference Between How We Perceive The World And What The World Turns Out To Be. The Difference Is Between The Stories We Tell Others And The Stories We Tell Ourselves. There Is A Wonderful Russian Saying, Which I Use As The Epigraph Of One Of My Novels, Which Goes, He Lies Like An Eyewitness. Which Is Very Sly, Clever And True.