Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical.

Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects.