How Wicked, My Brothers, Innocent

Blessed Tree And Blessed Birds, That Were To Be Neither Saved Nor Damned.

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.

Blockbusting Fiction Is Bought As Furniture. Unread, It Maintains Its Value. Read, It Looks Like Money Wasted. Cunningly, Americans Know That Books Contain A Person, And They Want The Person, Not The Book.

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.

It Seems Priggish Or Pollyannaish To Deny That My Intention In Writing The Work Was To Titillate The Nastier Propensities Of My Readers. My Own Healthy Inheritance Of Original Sin Comes Out In The Book And I Enjoyed Raping And Ripping By Proxy. It Is The Novelist’s Innate Cowardice That Makes Him Depute To Imaginary Personalities The Sins That He Is Too Cautious To Commit For Himself.