There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

The novel is very much alive, indeed. In Toronto at the Sixth Annual International Festival of Authors (October 1985) I listened to novelists by the dozen.

Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.

Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.