Not Being Boring Is Quite

I Turned The Pages So Fast. And I Suppose I Was, In My Mindless Way, Looking For A Something, Version Of Myself, A Heroine I Could Slip Inside As One Might A Pair Of Favourite Shoes.

In The First Half Of The 20th Century, We Lived Through Human Disasters On A Scale Unimaginable. The Holocaust Was Once Suggested Would Be The End Of Not Only Civilization, But Art, Too.

You Enter A State Of Controlled Passivity, You Relax Your Grip And Accept That Even If Your Declared Intention Is To Justify The Ways Of God To Man, You Might End Up Interesting Your Readers Rather More In Satan.

I Watched Our Friends' Wary, Intelligent Faces Droop At Our Tale. Their Shock Was A Mere Shadow Of Our Own, Resembling More The Goodwilled Imitation Of That Emotion, And For This Reason It Was A Temptation To Exaggerate, To Throw A Rope Of Superlatives Across The Abyss That Divided Experience From Its Representation By Anecdote.

How Can A Novelist Achieve Atonement When, With Her Absolute Power Of Deciding Outcomes, She Is Also God? There Is No One, No Entity Or Higher Form That She Can Appeal To, Or Be Reconciled With, Or That Can Forgive Her. There Is Nothing Outside Her. In Her Imagination She Has Set The Limits And The Terms. No Atonement For God, Or Novelists, Even If They Are Atheists. It Was Always An Impossible Task, And That Was Precisely The Point. The Attempt Was All.