One keeps healthy in wartime. . . by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.
I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.
But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.
Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.
Typically in my novels the narrator tells a story by remembering, and the memories are colored by this and colored by that. So the whole universe of the novel tends to be framed by the narrator's memories and thoughts.
Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.
When I got to 40 or so. . . I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.
It is emphatically the case that life could not arise spontaneously in a primeval soup from its kind.
Yet I would not die a maid, because I had a mother, As I was by one brought forth, I would bring forth another.
You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.
I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences.