A Combination Of All That

I Prize The Depression, For Instance, Because I Learned The Value Of Things In The Depression That A Way People Who Don't Have To Worry About Such Things Never Learned To Prize It Really, I Believe.

I Abhor The Idea Of A Perfect World. It Would Bore Me To Tears.

Before The War It Was Always The United States *are*, After The War It Was The United States Is... It Made Us An Is.

Of All The Passions Of Mankind, The Love Of Novelty Most Rules The Mind. In Search Of This, From Realm To Realm We Roam. Our Fleets Come Loaded With Every Folly Home.

The Point I Would Make Is That The Novelist And The Historian Are Seeking The Same Thing: The Truth – Not A Different Truth: The Same Truth – Only They Reach It, Or Try To Reach It, By Different Routes. Whether The Event Took Place In A World Now Gone To Dust, Preserved By Documents And Evaluated By Scholarship, Or In The Imagination, Preserved By Memory And Distilled By The Creative Process, They Both Want To Tell Us How It Was: To Re-create It, By Their Separate Methods, And Make It Live Again In The World Around Them.