You Don't Say, 'i've Done

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.

Writers Are Rarely Their Own Best Critics, Nor Are Critics.

We All Need Money, But There Are Degrees Of Desperation.

But Don't Think That It's A System Or A Culture Or A State Or A Person That Does The Letting Down. It's Our Expectations That Let Us Down. It Begins In The Warmth Of The Womb And The Discovery That It's Cold Outside. But It's Not The Cold's Fault That It's Cold.

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