I once met a girl that was happy. She stood in front of my desk at a Bookfair, and said: “I have read your book.” It was a compliment, I could tell, so I smiled back and asked the name of the girl and how old she was. “Ten,” she said. “And which book did you read then?” I asked. “That one,” she said, pointing. “And did you really enjoy it?” I asked. She nodded and kept on nodding. “Well,” I heard myself saying. “It’s nice to hear, because this is not an easy novel when you’re ten.” I could hit myself. I heard myself parroting what other adults love to repeat and repeat and repeat again. “This book is inaccessible for ten-year-olds.” What I mean is not that “all children of ten are different”. Yes, they are, but we have had that subject.

What I’m trying to say is that repetition makes things true. Repetition makes things true. The more you repeat something is inaccessible, the more inaccessible it becomes. The more people say something, the more we tend to believe it and repeat it as parrots.