literary

When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

Oh poor Octave, no luck at all, as usual," said Madame Rocher, "he is still with his regiment, still only a captain. Of course, if it hadn't been for this wretched war, he would be at least a colonel by now.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.

I always say, 'Books beat boredom,' said Amanda wisely.

Life will be empty without great stories to read.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

I__ loved women who were old and who were young; those extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these: where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I__l bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I__l bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

What is more precious: a thousand answers derived from one question? Or, one answer_from a thousand questions?

Who__ to say what a __iterary life_ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don__ need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

This was a lucky recollection -- it saved her from something like regret.

What did I think? Right then I was thinking about my father, specifically his habit of treating everyone with courtesy and consideration, of how he used to stop on lower Division Street and converse genially with old black men from the Hill whom he knew from his early days as a route man. His kindness and interest weren't feigned, nor did they derive, I'm convinced, from any perceived send of duty. His behavior was merely an extension of who he was. But here's the thing about my father that I've come to understand only reluctantly and very recently. If he wasn't the cause of what ailed his fellow man, neither was he the solution. He believed in "Do unto Others." It was a good, indeed golden, rule to by and it never occurred to him that perhaps it wasn't enough. "You ain't gotta love people," I remember him proclaiming to the Elite Coffee Club guys at Ikey's back in the early days. Confused by mean-spirited behavior, he was forever explaining how little it cost to be polite, to be nice to people. Make them feel good then they're down because maybe tomorrow you'll be down. Such a small thing. Love, he seemed to understand, was a very big thing indeed, its cost enormous and maybe more than you could afford if you were spendthrift. Nobody expects that of you, asny more than they expected you to hand out hundred-dollar bills on the street corner. And I remember my mother's response when he repeated over dinner what he'd told the men at the store. "Really, Lou? Isn't that exactly what we're supposed to do? Love people? Isn't that what the Bible says?

A library always housed a trove of undiscovered friendships and forays, and a bookstore, a place where those temporary connections might become a constancy, must always hold a charm over any scholar__ heart.

Short story collections are the literary equivalent of canapés, tapas and mezze in the world of gastronomy: Delightful assortments of tasty morsels to whet the reader's appetite.

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news _ things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that __t wouldn__ do_ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is __ot done_ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was __ot done_ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It__ not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It__ not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It__ not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it__ the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn__ matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they__e what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books _ for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We__e part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you__e surrounded by this shit _ to every side a reminder that we don__ want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you__e buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff _ history, science, economics _ provided they can stick __op._ in front of it, they__l stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It__ the new world _ we don__ want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they__e on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they__e somewhere between gallery and museum.

During the Government__ recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the land. I argued, to the contrary, that there should be one Shakespeare play and one play by anybody except Shakespeare. It cannot be in Shakespeare__ interest for teenagers to associate him with compulsion, for his plays and his alone to have the dreaded status of set books.