writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

Knowing a great deal about what is in the world art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when the see the real thing. For photographic images tend to subtract feeling from something we experience at first hand and the feelings they do arouse are, largely, not those we have in real life. Often something disturbs us more in photographed form than it does when we actually experience it.

People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.