If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.

Yet she felt an impostor, and already the mask had begun to bite into her face.

The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.

Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.

I felt the pressure of imagination against the doors of my mind was so great that they were going to burst.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.

People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It's a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it's the togetherness of modern technology.