A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

We knew so little about eachother. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man's privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended by the overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element - Mind.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

I'm sorry to say that far worse things have happened and the literature of the Holocaust is a witness to the capacity of the novel as a form.

Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.

None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy.