Work by Banksy, Ramallah, West Bank

“Isn’t it incredible that you can print in a book nowadays stuff which when we were young was found only on the walls of public lavatories.”  
- P.G. Wodehouse on Norman Mailer's “The Naked and the Dead” (1949)

"Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. When you’re 10, there is still an outside chance that you might find Narnia behind the wardrobe, that the fur coats could turn into fir trees. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. I don’t mean that kids can’t distinguish fantasy from reality — the playground bully will clarify the matter gratis — but fantasy offers a logic to which kids are receptive, and escapism for which kids are hungry." 
- David Mitchell on why children are drawn to fantasy fiction.  

"No true individual has existed yet, able to live, able to die.  Only diseased, tragic, or dismal and ludicrous fools who sometimes hoped to achieve some ideal by fiat, by their great desire for it.  But usually by bullying all mankind into believing them."

From Herzog by Saul Bellow

"Literature is news that stays news" - Ezra Pound

"If we put everyone who's corrupt in jail, who will close the door?" - Fmr Gov. of Chihuahua

You will be my ain true love - Sting

You'll walk unscathed through musket fire,
No ploughman's blade will cut thee down,
No cutlass wound will mark thy face

And you will be my ain true love,
And you will be my ain true love

And as you walk through death's dark veil,
The cannon's thunder can't prevail,
And those who hunt thee down will fail,

And you will be my ain true love,
And you will be my ain true love.

Asleep inside the cannon's mouth,
The captain cries, "Here comes the rout,"
They'll seek to find me north and south,

I've gone to find my ain true love.

The field is cut and bleeds to red.
The cannon balls fly round my head,
The infirmary man may count me dead,

When I've gone to find my ain true love,
I've gone to find my ain true love.