It's Without Doubt My Main Subject. The

Language Leads A Double Life - And So Does The Novelist. You Chat With Family And Friends, You Attend To Your Correspondence, You Consult Menus And Shopping Lists, You Observe Road Signs, And So On. Then You Enter Your Study, Where Language Exists In Quite Another Form - As The Stuff Of Patterned Artifice.

All The Things We Value In Society Don't Mean Much In Fiction.

Laughter Always Forgives.

We Hear About The Successful "texanisation" Of The Republican Party. And Doesn't Texas Sometimes Seem To Resemble A Country Like Saudi Arabia, With Its Great Heat, Its Oil Wealth, Its Brimming Houses Of Worship, And Its Weekly Executions?

Seeing The World Anew, As If It Were New, Is As Old As Writing. It's What All Painters Are Trying To Do, To See What's There, To See It In A Way That Renews It. It Becomes More And More Urgent As The Planet Gets Worn Flat And Forest After Forest Is Slain To Print The Paper For People's Impressions To Be Scrawled Down On. It Becomes Harder And Harder To Be Original, To See Things With An Innocent Eye. Innocence Is Much Tied Up With It. As The Planet Gets Progressively Less Innocent, You Need A More Innocent Eye To See It.