To Be Left Alone Is The Most

Novelists Are Perhaps The Last People In The World To Be Entrusted With Opinions. The Nature Of A Novel Is That It Has No Opinions, Only The Dialectic Of Contrary Views, Some Of Which, All Of Which, May Be Untenable And Even Silly. A Novelist Should Not Be Too Intelligent Either, Although He May Be Permitted To Be An Intellectual.

I Was Very Lighthearted. This Often The Way When The Abandonment Of Personal Responsibility Is Enforced: Neither Wronged Innocence Or Just Guilt Can Seriously Impair The Sensation Of Freedom One Has.

Civilised My Syphilised Yarbles.

Rome's Just A City Like Anywhere Else. A Vastly Overrated City, I'd Say. It Trades On Belief Just As Stratford Trades On Shakespeare.

There Is, In Fact, Not Much Point In Writing A Novel Unless You Can Show The Possibility Of Moral Transformation, Or An Increase In Wisdom, Operating In Your Chief Character Or Characters. Even Trashy Bestsellers Show People Changing. When A Fictional Work Fails To Show Change, When It Merely Indicates That Human Character Is Set, Stony, Unregenerable, Then You Are Out Of Field Of The Novel And Into That Of The Fable Or The Allegory. - From The Introduction Of The 1986 Norton Edition