Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teac… - Aldous Huxley

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

Oh, as far as they go." Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. "But they go such a little way. They aren't important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students — how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing — you know, like the very hardest X-rays — when you're writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing? That's what it finally boils down to. I try and I try.

I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.