[G]ood readers read the lines and better readers read the spaces. - John Barth

A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!

'Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.

Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature.