Fiction Is Art And Art Is The

To Disguise Nothing, To Conceal Nothing, To Write About Those Things That Are Closest To Our Pain, Our Happiness; To Write About Our Sexual Clumsiness, The Agonies Of Tantalus, The Depth Of Our Discouragement-what We Glimpse In Our Dreams-our Despair. To Write About The Foolish Agonies Of Anxiety, The Refreshment Of Our Strength When These Are Ended; To Write About Our Painful Search For Self, Jeopardized By A Stranger In The Post Office, A Half-seen Face In A Train Window, To Write About The Continents And Populations Of Our Dreams, About Love And Death, Good And Evil, The End Of The World.

Literature Has Been The Salvation Of The Damned, Literature Has Inspired And Guided Lovers, Routed Despair And Can Perhaps In This Case Save The World.

Fiction Is Art And Art Is The Triumph Over Chaos (no Less) And We Can Accomplish This Only By The Most Vigilant Exercise Of Choice, But In A World That Changes More Swiftly That We Can Perceive There Is Always The Danger That Our Powers Of Selection Will Be Mistaken And That The Vision We Serve Will Come To Nothing.

For Lovers, Touch Is Metamorphosis. All The Parts Of Their Bodies Seem To Change, And They Seem To Become Something Different And Better.

The Novel Remains For Me One Of The Few Forms Where We Can Record Man's Complexity And The Strength And Decency Of His Longings.