History Is The Lies Of The Victors.

Reading And Life Are Not Separate But Symbiotic. And For This Serious Task Of Imaginative Discovery And Self-discovery, There Is And Remains One Perfect Symbol: The Printed Book.

Does Character Develop Over Time? In Novels, Of Course It Does: Otherwise There Wouldn't Be Much Of A Story. But In Life? I Sometimes Wonder. Our Attitudes And Opinions Change, We Develop New Habits And Eccentricities; But That's Something Different, More Like Decoration. Perhaps Character Resembles Intelligence, Except That Character Peaks A Little Later: Between Twenty And Thirty, Say. And After That, We're Just Stuck With What We've Got. We're On Our Own. If So, That Would Explain A Lot Of Lives, Wouldn't It? And Also - If This Isn't Too Grand A Word - Our Tragedy.

What Makes Us Want To Know The Worst? Is It That We Tire Of Preferring To Know The Best? Does Curiosity Always Hurdle Self-interest? Or Is It, More Simply, That Wanting To Know The Worst Is Love's Favorite Perversion.

The Writer Has Little Control Over Personal Temperament, None Over Historical Moment, And Is Only Partly In Charge Of His Or Her Own Aesthetic.

[flaubert] Didn’t Just Hate The Railway As Such; He Hated The Way It Flattered People With The Illusion Of Progress. What Was The Point Of Scientific Advance Without Moral Advance? The Railway Would Merely Permit More People To Move About, Meet And Be Stupid Together.