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" The word 'western' usually refers to movies, of course, but there is a literary tradition of the same name that pre-dates the moving picture and retains its vitality yet. "

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" My own zigzag path through life led me back to Santa Cruz in the early Eighties, and I have revisited regularly since. The place hasn't changed: head in the clouds, backside on the hills and feet in the ocean - one of the most decent and beautiful places on earth. "

Clive Sinclair

Ocean

Beautiful

Clouds

" Back when I was young, lists seemed like fences on the open range. But secretly, I was pleased to be corralled among other literary thoroughbreds. "

Clive Sinclair

Back

Lists

" McCarthy's prose in 'Blood Meridian' comes blazing from the Book of Revelation. "

" Hinde Esther Singer was born in Poland on March 31, 1881, the daughter of Bathsheva and Pinchos Mendel Singer. Bathsheva was an intellectual, but both Bathsheva's father and her husband disapproved of erudite women. "

" When I was growing up in north-west London, our milkman's cart was pulled by a horse, and cattle still grazed on the meadows near Church Farm. "

" Copywriting cuts the communication cord between word and feeling. By offering instant gratification, it atrophies more subtle emotions. "

Clive Sinclair

Feeling

Communication

" Every year in late June, Custer's Last Stand is reenacted on the high plains of Montana. When Custer led out the 7th Cavalry in 2003 - the year I witnessed it - the audience stood and cheered with turbo-charged patriotism. "

" Ambassadors are, by definition, foreign bodies. "

" In 1966, I bought my parents a carriage clock for their silver wedding anniversary. It was last wound 30 years later, in December 1996, the month my father died. "

" Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end. "

" I believe that there may well be a personal God out there - not a monotheistic God - that has got it in for me. "

Clive Sinclair

Believe

Personal

" Back in 1948, a monomaniac called Korczak resolved to impose Crazy Horse's likeness upon a mountain. It took 50 years to complete the head, which measures 90ft from crown to chin. By comparison, the four presidents at Mt Rushmore seem modest. "

" At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past. "

" I still see the world as a place of bitter irony and black humour, failed hopes, dashed plans. I hope to make my work sparer, to outgrow my desire to show off. "

" I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys. "

" The summer of 1976 was so hot that bars of chocolate melted on the shelves before confectioners could sell them. "

" It would be a big mistake to think that Chekhov was a natural, that he did not have to work for his effects and singular style. "

Clive Sinclair

Natural

Style

" The idea of the split personality is as old as Genesis. For a start, Eve was manufactured from Adam's rib. Then there's Cain and Abel, twins at war. They were followed by Esau and Jacob, likewise divisible into hairy and smooth types. "

" I'll tell you now that I hate myself for many reasons, but being Jewish is not one of them. "

" You have to turn a blind eye to politics in nearly all Westerns. "

" As I was writing, I realised I wasn't sufficiently extrovert to gather enough interesting souls with tall tales around me. I was no Louis Theroux. But neither was I interested in exploring my inner life in public, in the manner of a Jonathan Raban. "

" Many years ago, when I lived in the mini-Siberia they call East Anglia, I was awakened in the early hours by the sound of a pantechnicon being loaded. Peeping through the curtains, I observed the grocer doing a runner with all his chattels and his family. "

" My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming. "

" In 1935, Faber & Faber published an anthology entitled 'My Best Western Story' in which the genre's leading practitioners contributed what they considered their finest. Alas, literature the stories ain't; they appear more like fossils from a spent mine. "

Clive Sinclair

Literature

" I had a Latin master who, for no rational reason whatsoever - I was a very quiet kid at school - just hated me. "

" I do not mean for one second to suggest that 'White Doves at Morning' was written with a movie deal in mind. Certainly not. "

" If someone like my father chooses to criticise Israeli policies, it's not because he is a self-hating Jew, but because he is not prepared to live in a state of self-denial. "

Clive Sinclair

Someone

Live

" Deadwood lies at the northern tip of the Black Hills, where the land is ancient and rubbed smooth by time. The Black Hills are more rugged at their southern extremity, where bare granite forms pinnacles and spires. "

" Hinde Esther Kreitman is a forgotten literary foremother, her works largely lost, ignored and out of print. "

Clive Sinclair

Out

Works

" One-eyed Reuben 'Rooster' Cogburn is the role that finally delivered John Wayne his Oscar. "