Death, The Real Simile For Disease -

What Fiction Offers Us Is An Intimacy Shorn Of The Messy Contingencies Of Human Existence - Gender, Race, Class Or Age. Those Moments Of Transcendence When We Exclaim "you Know Exactly What I Mean!" Depend For Much Of Their Force On The Anonymous Character Of The Intimacy Between Writer And Reader.

Lives Don't Divide Up Into Chapters. People Don't Just Talk, While Nothing's Going On In Their Head, And Then Respond. You Know, None Of These Things Actually Happen.

With Spectacular Events Taking Up So Much Of The Available Anxiety Quotient, We Need To Be Constantly Reminded Of The More Workaday Threats To Our Mortality - Threats That, While They May Also Be Functions Of Human Error, Have Become So Ubiquitous That We've Begun To Apprehend Them As Natural Phenomena.

Well, I Wanted To Be A Philosopher, Which Is The Idlest Occupation In The World. I Wanted To Be Involved In Abstract Thought, But Because Of Various Problems With The Authorities I Wasn't Able To Pull That One Off. A Lifetime Of Idleness In Academia Would Have Really Suited Me. So I Was Thrown Out, As It Were. Other Than That, There Seemed No Possible Idle Occupations, So Writing . . . Although Writing Isn't Exactly Idleness. There's An Enormous Tension Between Indolence And Languor.

The British And American Literary Worlds Operate In An Odd Kind Of Symbiosis: Our Critics Think Our Contemporary Novelists Are Not The Stuff Of Greatness Whereas Certain Contemporary Americans Indubitably Are. Their Critics Often Advance The Exact Opposite: British Fiction Is Cool, American Naff.