“And the rejection is what people can’t understand. This wasn’t a “found out my husband or my wife is leaving me for another person,” or “my best friend has betrayed me” type of rejection. This was a rejection by the world of my very existence. That you are not a human being in the way the world understands human beings to be. It was feeling like you were being wiped off the map of humanity. I did not have the language then to explain that. I barely have it now.

Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives. It is not those who have no imagination who are the problem, for we all possess imagination, few of us use it well. The problem is with those who are frightened of the rather limitless validity of the imagination, frightened of people who continually extend the boundaries of the possible, people who ceaselessly redream the world and reinvent existence; frontiers people of the unknown and the uncharted.

There is the great suffering that is an intrinsic part of love, the love of one’s work, the love of the world, and of humanity. There is the unbargained-for cost of telling stories — the hounding by dictators, military leaders, spy networks, secret services, all those with their own agendas, all those who like or dislike only through the screen or filter of their ideologies or insecurities. There are other costs — the death-threats, the enmities incurred by the innocence of the word, the demons of rivalry, the degrading competition which leads the best practitioners, if they submit, away from their beautiful journey.

Iago is a lonely and bitter man. He is the man who utterly refuses to transcend himself. He does not accept reality and he refuses to face history. And yet he is in his twisted way an intelligent man. He has not found the vocation in which to utilise his considerable imaginative gifts. He is so seemingly friendly, so seemingly on your side, he is all appearance. He is the supreme test for those who will not see clearly; who will not see deeply into people. He thinks more intensely than anyone else in the play. In fact, he has the mind of a playwright, manipulating people around his plots.

The superiority of one writer over another is not just in the quality of language; but also in the quality of the story and the storytelling; the quality of enchantment; and the timelessness of that enchantment. It is therefore futile to speak of superiorities. There is only that which lives, and which keeps on living.