If We Had Not Met,

The Pleasure Of Writing Fiction Is That You Are Always Spotting Some New Approach, An Alternative Way Of Telling A Story And Manipulating Characters; The Novel Is Such A Wonderfully Flexible Form.

Getting To Know Someone Else Involves Curiosity About Where They Have Come From, Who They Are.

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.

I Have Long Been Interested In Landscape History, And When Younger And More Robust I Used To Do Much Tramping Of The English Landscape In Search Of Ancient Field Systems, Drove Roads, Indications Of Prehistoric Settlement. Towns And Cities, Too, Which Always Retain The Ghost Of Their Earlier Incarnations Beneath Today's Concrete And Glass.

Mythology Is Much Better Stuff Than History. It Has Form; Logic; A Message.