I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. "You have to let me in," he says. "I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?" And they answer, "Well, we read it and it makes no sense." SLAM.

Wagner thought Rossini unserious; Rossini thought Wagner 'lacked sun'. Wagner also became the butt of a phrase Rossini had used down the years to describe musicians about whom he had certain reservations - "He has some beautiful moments but some bad quarters of an hour!

All this, and Heaven too!

HEAVEN: The big apartheid in the sky.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.