The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.