The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.

Another reason I think the novel will survive is that the reader has to work in a novel. In a film, you are presented with someone else's imagination exactly bodied out. The marvelous thing about a novel is that every reader will imagine even the very simplest sentence slightly differently.

The dead live." "How do they live?" "By love.

Just those three words, said and meant. I love you. They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer. His fairy story.

Ask me to marry you." "Will you marry me?" "No.

Medieval theologians used to dispute how the angels in the heaven spent their time, when not balancing on needle points and singing anthems to the Lord. I know. They slump glued to their clouds, glasses at the ready, as the Archangel Micheal (that well-known slasher) and stonewalling St Peter open against the Devils XI. It could not be Heaven, otherwise.