I Didn't Write Anything Until

We Open Our Mouths And Out Flow Words Whose Ancestries We Do Not Even Know. We Are Walking Lexicons. In A Single Sentence Of Idle Chatter We Preserve Latin, Anglo-saxon, Norse: We Carry A Museum Inside Our Heads, Each Day We Commemorate Peoples Of Whom We Have Never Heard.

Grief-stricken. Stricken Is Right; It Is As Though You Had Been Felled. Knocked To The Ground; Pitched Out Of Life And Into Something Else.

I Believe That The Experience Of Childhood Is Irretrievable. All That Remains, For Any Of Us, Is A Headful Of Brilliant Frozen Moments, Already Dangerously Distorted By The Wisdoms Of Maturity.

If People Don't Read, That's Their Choice; A Lifelong Book Habit May Itself Be Some Sort Of Affliction.

Perhaps I Shall Not Write My Account Of The Paleolithic At All, But Make A Film Of It. A Silent Film At That, In Which I Shall Show You First The Great Slumbering Rocks Of The Cambrian Period, And Move From Those To The Mountains Of Wales...from Ordovician To Devonian, On The Lush Glowing Cotswolds, On To The White Cliffs Of Dover... An Impressionistic, Dreaming Film, In Which The Folded Rocks Arise And Flower And Grow And Become Salisbury Cathedral And York Minster.