A Visit To Père Lachaise

A Kind Of Banalization Of Celebrity Has Occurred: We Are Now Offered An Instant, Ready-to-mix Fame As Nutritious As Packet Soup.

Nudity In Photography, Whether Involving Adults Or Children, Is A Subject Sinking Under A Freight Of Political And Moral Disapproval It Could Never Hope To Support, And This Is Not The Place For Me To Get Out The Bilge Pump. I Will Only Say That Critics Who Tremble So Fiercely At The Thought Of The Voyeuristic Male Gaze Miss The Point That Distance Generates Mystery And Enchantment, And Expresses The Awe With Which The Male Imagination Regards All Women.

I Take For Granted That For The Imaginative Writer, The Exercise Of The Imagination Is Part Of The Basic Process Of Coping With Reality, Just As Actors Need To Act All The Time To Make Up For Some Deficiency In Their Sense Of Themselves.

People Nowadays Like To Be Together Not In The Old-fashioned Way Of, Say, Mingling On The Piazza Of An Italian Renaissance City, But, Instead, Huddled Together In Traffic Jams, Bus Queues, On Escalators And So On. It's A New Kind Of Togetherness Which May Seem Totally Alien, But It's The Togetherness Of Modern Technology.

I Believe In The Power Of The Imagination To Remake The World, To Release The Truth Within Us, To Hold Back The Night, To Transcend Death, To Charm Motorways, To Ingratiate Ourselves With Birds, To Enlist The Confidences Of Madmen.