Here it is: there’s only one story. There, I said it and I can’t very well take it back. There is only one story. Ever. One. It’s always been going on and it’s everywhere around us and every story you’ve ever read or heard or watched is part of it.

T here’s no written rule anywhere that I know of stating this, no First-teenth Amendment to the Literary Constitution, but there might as well be: you get one national poet.

Don’t wait for writers to be dead to be read; the living ones can use the money.

Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn’t. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.

Where readers of Murdoch can begin a new novel with a quiet confidence, opening a Burgess book is an exercise in anxiety: what the devil is he up to this time?

What we mean when speaking of “myth” in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry – all very highly useful and informative in their own right – can’t.

And we feel that those characters couldn’t be anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn’t say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland.

Don’t read with your eyes.

The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn’t think Satan was involved.

We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn’t die, just as it doesn’t ‘progress’ or ‘decay.’ It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.