And Shanghai is amazing. I'm a fan of science fiction so when you're there in the night with all the lights and all this modernity it's like a set in a movie.

A book is sent out into the world and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible Homer Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

In the modern media age we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre everything is so advertised so trailed that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere turning its back on the political realm.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

The reason for the sadness of this modern age and the men who live in it is that it looks for the truth in everything and finds it.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age the airplane the atom bomb the radio in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

Discrimination due to age is one of the great tragedies of modern life. The desire to work and be useful is what makes life worth living and to be told your efforts are not needed because you are the wrong age is a crime.