He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.

I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.

But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.

Writers are said to have superstitions and little rituals. Readers have them too.

come back, come back to me

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.