"God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction," she said. "It's different with us, I haven't been to mass for years, … - Angus Wilson

But you mustn't be too sane, darlings. It really won't do in this family.

When was reviewing Doris Lessing's last two books from the Shikasta series, I found that she has discovered what I, to my great joy, had discovered a little earlier: that (a) if you're writing what they call science fiction, you're absolutely free-you can write anything you damn please, and (b) that if you take seriously the science fiction premise, you are furnished with an inexhaustable supply of absolutely beautiful and complex metaphors for our present situation, for who and where we are now, and I think it's not only women who have found this out. Angus Wilson was one of the first to do this with The Old Man in the Zoo years ago. That is a science fiction novel, if you look at it closely.

All writers know aspects of life that they take very much for granted, that yet to their readers appear peculiar, special.