It is only when science asks why, instead of simply describing how, that it becomes more than technology. When it asks why, it discovers Relativity. When it only shows how, it invents the atom bomb, and then puts its hands over its eye and says, My God what have I done?

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.

Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.

Little mirrors were attached to the front of their cars, at which they glanced to see where they had been; then they stared ahead again. I had thought that only beetles had this delusion of Progress.

When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.

Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we’ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.