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The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that...more

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I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us t...more

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Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not...more

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You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and ma...more

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Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great wo...more

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Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essent...more

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And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the...more

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Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: C...more

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The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitar...more

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Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose f...more

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But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indiffer...more

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When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their d...more

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correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not j...more

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It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools— all those places ...more