Like all mystics (and many novelists, not least the present one) he is baffled, a child, before the real now; far happier out of it, in a narrative past or a prophetic future, locked inside that weird tence grammar does not allow, the imaginary present.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.

Wealth is a monster. It takes a month to learn to control it financially. And many years to learn to control it psychologically.

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 price of tapping water into every house is that no one values water any more.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.