The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

The limits of that language—shared assumptions of class, culture, education, ethics—both focus and shrink the scope of the fiction.

incessant radical change, is not describable in a language that assumes continuity and a common experience of life.

the global, intuitional language of fantasy to describe, as accurately as they can, the way “we” live “now.”

We have been told that there is only one kind of people and they are men. And I think it is very important that we all believe that. It certainly is important to the men.

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

What luck for a child to meet such a soul when she is young. What luck for a country to have a Mark Twain in its heart.

The story is the way the story is told.

If there are frontiers between the civilised and the barbaric, between the meaningful and the unmeaning, they are not lines on a map nor are they regions of the earth. They are boundaries of the mind alone.

Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

Fiction is often really much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing usef