A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer.

To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished.

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.