I Read All The Time. I Was

I Read All The Time. I Was Reading A Book I Admire Very Much By Alice Mcdermot Called Charming Billy.

Without The Book Business It Would Be Difficult Or Impossible For True Books To Find Their True Readers And Without That Solitary (and Potentially Subversive) Alone With A Book The Whole Razzmatazz Of Prizes, Banquets, Television Spectaculars, Bestseller Lists, Even Literature Courses, Editors And Authors, Are All Worthless. Unless A Book Finds Lovers Among Those Solitary Readers, It Will Not Live . . . Or Live For Long.

I Think There's A Great Difference In Consciousness In That Same Way In That When We're Young We Read Books For The Story, For The Excitement Of The Story - And There Comes A Time When You Realise That All Stories Are More Or Less The Same Story.

Ireland Is A Peculiar Society In The Sense That It Was A Nineteenth Century Society Up To About 1970 And Then It Almost Bypassed The Twentieth Century.

Among Its Many Other Obligations, Fiction Always Has To Be Believable. Life Does Not Have To Suffer Such Constraint, And Much Of What Takes Place Is Believable Only Because It Happens.