Don't Tell Me About The World. Not

Today There Are A Lot Of Novelists Who Seem To Be Writing To Be Reviewed, Not Read.

The Library Is A Place Where Most Of The Things I Came To Value As An Adult Had Their Beginnings.

What Libraries Give You Is All Three Tenses - The Past Tense - The Present Tense In Which We Live And The Future That We Can Only Imagine. These Places Have Teachers Who Are Living And Dead And We Are Lucky To Have Them. If I Sit Here And Read Aristotle, He Is Speaking To Me Across A Thousand Years - More Than A Thousand Years. That Sense That I Am In The Company Of The Great Greatest People Who Ever Lived Is A Humbling Experience But A Liberating Experience.

Don't Tell Me About The World. Not Today. It's Springtime And They're Knocking Baseball Around Fields Where The Grass Is Damp And Green In The Morning And The Kids Are Trying To Hit The Curve Ball.

My Ambition Was To Embrace Those General Qualities That Ernest Hemingway, A Former Newspaperman, Once Said Should Be Present In All Good Books: 'the Good And The Bad, The Ecstasy, The Remorse And Sorrow, The People And The Places And How The Weather Was.'