I Rather Like Getting Away From Fiction.

There's A Fearful Term That's In Fashion At The Moment - Closure. People Apparently Believe It Is Desirable And Attainable.

All I Know For Certain Is That Reading Is Of The Most Intense Importance To Me; If I Were Not Able To Read, To Revisit Old Favorites And Experiment With Names New To Me, I Would Be Starved - Probably Too Starved To Go On Writing Myself.

I'm Not A Historian But I Can Get Interested - Obsessively Interested - With Any Aspect Of The Past, Whether It's Palaeontology Or Archaeology Or The Very Recent Past.

The Past Is Our Ultimate Privacy; We Pile It Up, Year By Year, Decade By Decade, It Stows Itself Away, With Its Perverse Random Recall System.

We All Need A Past - That's Where Our Sense Of Identity Comes From.