To Read And To Write. Some Writers

What Children Don't Understand, And Can't Understand Until They Grow Up Some, Is How Much The Whole Fabric And Process Of Human Society Depends On Everybody Agreeing To Ignore, Most Of The Time, The Fact That All Of Us Are, Most Of The Time, Inadequate, Incompetent, Pitiful, And, In Fact, Naked To Our Enemies. None Of Us Really Has Very Much In The Way Of Spiritual, Moral Clothing. We Dress Ourselves In Rags. And We Agree To Say Nothing About It. To A Very Large Extent, It Is Human Charity That Clothes Us.

There's A Great Fear Of The Imagination. It's A Dangerous Thing. It's Out Of Control, It's Subversive.

Fiction Writers, At Least In Their Braver Moments, Do Desire The Truth: To Know It, Speak It, Serve It. But They Go About It In A Peculiar And Devious Way, Which Consists In Inventing Persons, Places, And Events Which Never Did And Never Will Exist Or Occur, And Telling About These Fictions In Detail And At Length And With A Great Deal Of Emotion, And Then When They Are Done Writing Down This Pack Of Lies, They Say, There! That's The Truth!

I'd Rather Get Bad News From An Honest Man Than Lies From A Flatterer.

Public Speaking Is Done In The Public Tongue, The National Or Tribal Language; And The Language Of Our Tribe Is The Men's Language. Of Course Women Learn It. We're Not Dumb. If You Can Tell Margaret Thatcher From Ronald Reagan, Or Indira Gandhi From General Somoza, By Anything They Say, Tell Me How. This Is A Man's World, So It Talks A Man's Language.