When I Am Writing Novels

Among The Great Struggles Of Man-good/evil, Reason/unreason, Etc.-there Is Also This Mighty Conflict Between The Fantasy Of Home And The Fantasy Of Away, The Dream Of Roots And The Mirage Of The Journey.

Sometimes By A Woodland Stream He Watched The Water Rush Over The Pebbled Bed, Its Tiny Modulations Of Bounce And Flow. A Woman's Body Was Like That. If You Watched It Carefully Enough You Could See How It Moved To The Rhythm Of The World, The Deep Rhythm, The Music Below The Music, The Truth Below The Truth. He Believed In This Hidden Truth The Way Other Men Believed In God Or Love, Believed That Truth Was In Fact Always Hidden, That The Apparent, The Overt, Was Invariably A Kind Of Lie.

One Of The Problems Of Truth Being Censored For A Really Long Time Is That People Lose The Ability To Intuit What Truth Might Be, And Therefore Begin To Swallow Whatever They're Fed. I Think That's Something That The Chinese Have Learned Very Well. They've Even Managed To Persuade Quite Large Segments Of The Population That The Martyrs Of Tiananmen Were Actually An Anti-national Element. People Don't View Them As Heroes, They See Them As Troublemakers. There You Have A Combination Of Censorship Of Truth Creating A New Truth, Which Is The Lie, But It's Not Seen As Such.

You Want All Your Books To Stick Around After You've Gone.

Broad-mindedness Is Related To Tolerance; Open-mindedness Is The Sibling Of Peace.