What your mind sees when you close your eyes marks the entrance to an endless universe: your imagination.

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habitual behaviors seen in nature. But as beings who know they will die we digress into episodes and epics that are altogether dissociated from the natural world. We may isolate this awareness, distract ourselves from it, anchor our minds far from its shores, and sublimate it as a motif in our sagas. Yet at no time and in no place are we protected from being tapped on the shoulder and reminded, __ou__e going to die, you know._ However much we try to ignore it, our consciousness haunts us with this knowledge. Our heads were baptized in the font of death; they are doused with the horror of moribundity.

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.

If a culture is good or evil, it is only because of its carriers.

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes _ affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism _ the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.

Being well known for being well-known did not necessarily imply intelligence.