A Novel With A Bad

The Paradox Of The English Country House Is That Its State Of Permanent Decline, The Fact That Its Heyday Is Always Behind It, Is Part Of The Seduction, Just As It Is Part Of The Seduction Of Books In General.

The Life I Should Be Living Had Been Mislaid Through Some Clerical Error By The Cosmic Bureaucracy.

Nothing Is Wrong With You. You're Not Different. Everybody Feels As Bad As You Do: This Is Just What Writing A Novel Feels Like. To Write A Novel Is To Come In Contact With Raw, Primal Feelings, Hopes And Longings And Psychic Wounds, And Try To Make A Big Public Word-sculpture Out Of Them, And That Is A Crazy Hard Thing To Do.

Most People Carry That Pain Around Inside Them Their Whole Lives, Until They Kill The Pain By Other Means, Or Until It Kills Them. But You, My Friends, You Found Another Way: A Way To Use The Pain. To Burn It As Fuel, For Light And Warmth. You Have Learned To Break The World That Has Tried To Break You.

You Don't Want To Move Toward Some Utopian Literary Situation Where Everybody's Free Of All Conventions. That's Ridiculous! Conventions Are What You Need. You Have Nothing To Break Down If You Don't Have Conventions.