The Telling Of Stories Creates The Real

Every Reader Exists To Ensure For A Certain Book A Modest Immortality. Reading Is, In This Sense, A Ritual Of Rebirth.

Readers Are Bullied In Schoolyards And In Locker-rooms As Much As In Government Offices And Prisons.

In My Fool Hardy Youth, When My Friends Were Dreaming Of Heroic Deeds In The Realms Of Engineering And Law, Finance And National Politics, I Dreamt Of Becoming A Librarian.

Through Ignorance, Through Faith, Through Intelligence, Through Trickery And Cunning, Through Illumination, The Reader Rewrites The Text With The Same Words Of The Original But Under Another Heading, Re-creating It, As It Were, In The Very Act Of Bringing It Into Being.

From Fire, Water, The Passage Of Time, Neglectful Readers, And The Hand Of The Censor, Each Of My Books Has Escaped To Tell Me Its Story.