The most condensed format of the conversionist motif is the TV commercial, which has become essential to both network and religiou...s broadcasting. Embedded in its structure are sentiments from our religious and political heritage: salvation and choice. Newness of life can now be associated with a change of heart about politics, the purchase of a new car, or the selection of a beverage. A Pepsi commercial, for example, designed to fit the charismatic personality and gifts of singer Michael Jackson, became an invitation to make a decision and join in. Images and sounds of the soft-drink ad drew viewers into a growing throng of happy, dancing people following the steps of a dynamic cultural hero. Even couch potatoes might have been roused, vicariously at least, to skip lightly behind the agile Jackson as he led his ecstatic followers to the right choice. The conversionist call in this instance is to come on up to the good life through Pepsi. Nonetheless it plays upon the persuasive motifs of turning around and becoming a part of something larger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We spend all day broadcasting on the radio and TV telling people back home what's happening here. And we learn what's happening he...re by spending all day monitoring the radio and TV broadcasts from back home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Eddie did not die. He is no longer on Channel 4, and our sets are tuned to Channel 4; he's on Channel 7, but he's still broadcasti...ng. Physical incarnation is highly overrated; it is one corner of universal possibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to wha...t? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the age of twelve I was finding the world too small: it appeared to me like a dull, trim back garden, in which only trivial gam...es could be played.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. I...t accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of ima...ginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »