The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

You have wondered, perhaps, why all real accountants wear hats? They are today's cowboys. As will you be. Riding the American range. Riding herd on the unending torrent of financial data. The eddies, cataracts, arranged variations, fractious minutiae. You order the data, shepherd it, direct its flow, lead it where it's needed ... You deal in facts, gentlemen, for which there has been a market since man first crept from the primeval slurry.

What TV is extremely good at - and realize that this is 'all it does' - is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.

We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story.