The United States, democratic and various though it is, is not an easy country for a fiction-writer to enter: the slot between the fantastic and the drab seems too narrow.

I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

A computer and a cat are somewhat alike - they both purr, and like to be stroked, and spend a lot of the day motionless. They also have secrets they don't necessarily share.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.