The trade-off between anonymity and glory in the world of creative work is due to the epicene nature of the work itself. Anonymity desires glory, and glory desires anonymity, and each flows towards the other. In the tension and desire of each for the other is found the creative work.

What I would like to ask theorists who create taxonomies of everything is this: Does your own theory fit into the taxonomy? It seems to me, that no matter how this question is answered, it presents an insoluble logical dilemma. For if the taxonomy contains the theory, then the theory is smaller in scope than the taxonomy itself, and hence cannot include it; but if, on the other hand, the theory does not fit into the taxomony, then it is something extraneous to the taxonomy - and a taxonomy cannot be of everything as long as there is something extraneous to it.

We are never as modern as we would like to think. We see our transcendence of, or our unmooring from, the past. We feel as if we are adrift, even as we search for some provenance in history for our predicament, like a child seeking its parent. We name our era in such a way as to capture our awestruck, revelatory disenfranchisement. In a few years, we all die, and future generations take that very name to mean something historical, categorical, transitory, and in no way to be compared with their own sense of thrownness into the Void, that crystal cold terror-in-joy, which, though they may deny it, is exactly the same as ours. Our name was intended to sound a gong through the ages, as if to say, 'from now on, everything will be different'. But that gong has been sounding through the ages, and we are just the ringing of it.

I have great faith in the scientific method, which after all is our formal instantiation of our own conditioning principles as organisms, but I don't have too much faith in many scientists. Last century alone , scientists from a variety of cultures were complicit in an enormous number of human rights abuses. Warfare technology itself is a branch of science of course. I have plenty of respect for science, but there are a lot of scientists who would, with a slight change of outfit, make equally great tyrants. I am thinking maybe the problem is one of authoritarianism, and the concomitant use of belief as a control mechanism. Perhaps we should be talking about 'believers' rather than 'religious people'. I fear all true believers, and see them as a potential threat to the survival of the species.

The creative process is alchemical, primitive and magical at first - because you don't quite know what you're doing - then, gradually, it becomes more and more scientific, as you come to identify causes and effects, the formula behind the process. Once you understand the whole chain of events back to front, it appears to be entirely prosaic - and then you have the urge to move on, to seek more illusion. You find a sense of danger, of taking risks, to be crucial to your own sense of artistic adventure. You find your delight in the open spaces which beckon in the almost-safe, almost-dangerous region between care and recklessness. Too much of the former, and the artistic outcome is bland and predictable, and you are also jostled by a million uninteresting people; too much of the latter and you risk losing your bearings and even your sanity of course.

The trouble with seeking the keys to the creative process from the history of great men is that great men invariably wish, in their hearts, to become famous. Therefore, they conspire and collude, trample and take, reject and steal, confabulate and condemn, ignore and occlude, fawn and cavil, rage and storm, and do various other undignified acts in order to attract attention to themselves. This is how they become famous: there is no other way to become famous. No matter what our culture has told us, the truth is that these men are not great. They have neither happiness nor wisdom, only technique. A moth has technique.

Every religion is an expression of atheism, couched in richly anthropomorphic, symbolic language, with a few characters thrown in for the children.

Our Creator is tiny: you can squash Him like a bug.

At first it seemed that his book was a mighty polemic against that type, the intellectual hypocrite, but, in a more analytic moment several years later, it became evident to me that he was simply a gossip who was unaware he was describing, not the enemies of freedom, not even his own enemies, but himself. The tragedy of propounding a vociferous critique is that the reasons behind one's invective are, in the end, trivial, personal, and bound to our infantile need for redress, and that is why wisdom is alloyed with silence.