You Can't Sort Of Write

I Think Novelists Are In The Education Business, Really, But They're Not Teaching You Times Tables, They Are Teaching You Responsiveness And Morality And To Make Nuanced Judgments. And Really To Just Make The Planet Look A Bit Richer When You Go Out Into The Street.

It Was The Tiredness Of Time Lived, With Its Days And Days. It Was The Tiredness Of Gravity- Gravity, Which Wants You Down In The Center Of The Earth.

Being Inoffensive, And Being Offended, Are Now The Twin Addictions Of The Culture.

When Communism Failed, It Wasn't A Good Idea That Had Gone Wrong, It Was A Bad Idea That Had Been Sustained With Incredible Determination In The Face Of All The Commonsense Arguments, And At The Cost Of 20 Million Lives At Least, In Russia, To Build The Socialist Utopia.

What Did Nabokov And Joyce Have In Common, Apart From The Poor Teeth And The Great Prose? Exile, And Decades Of Near Pauperism.