Creation Is Not A Light-hearted Game. The

Crimes Of Which A People Is Ashamed Constitute Its Real History. The Same Is True Of Man.

Perhaps All Music, Even The Newest, Is Not So Much Something Discovered As Something That Re-emerges From Where It Lay Buried In The Memory, Inaudible As A Melody Cut In A Disc Of Flesh. A Composer Lets Me Hear A Song That Has Always Been Shut Up Silent Within Me.

By Stretching Language We'll Distort It Sufficiently To Wrap Ourselves In It And Hide.

When We See Life, We Call It Beautiful. When We See Death, We Call It Ugly. But It Is More Beautiful Still To See Oneself Living At Great Speed, Right Up To The Moment Of Death.

They Remain Dead, The People I Try To Resuscitate By Straining To Hear What They Say. But The Illusion Is Not Pointless, Or Not Quite, Even If The Reader Knows All This Better Than I Do. One Thing A Book Tries To Do, Beneath The Disguise Of Words And Causes And Clothes And Grief, Is Show The Skeleton And The Skeleton Dust To Come. The Author Too, Like Those Of Whom He Speaks, Is Dead.