Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

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

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

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.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

When you take a child who's hollering like hell, sit him on your knee, and say "once upon a time", you stop him hollering. As long as you go on telling him a story, he will listen. Novelists who neglect this fundamental effect do so at their peril. They become what is known as the experimental novelist, and an experimental novel is not really a novel at all.