But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

For it must be very lonely being dead.

Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. it must be allowed to decay.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

Prescription: 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, til end of course.