A Novel Is A Commodity That Fulfills

The Only Excuse For A Novelist, Aside From The Entertainment And Vicarious Living His Books Give The People Who Read Them, Is As A Sort Of Second-class Historian Of The Age He Lives In. The "reality" He Missed By Writing About Imaginary People, He Gains By Being Able To Build A Reality More Nearly Out Of His Own Factual Experience Than A Plain Historian Or Biographer Can.

It Has Been The Struggle Between Privileged Men Who Have Managed To Get Hold Of The Levers Of Power And The People In General Withtheir Vague And Changing Aspirations For Equality, For Justice, For Some Kind Of Gentler Brotherhood And Peace, Which Has Kept That Balance Of Forces We Call Our System Of Government In Equilibrium.

War Is Utter Damn Nonsense, A Vast Cancer Fed By Lies And Self Seeking Malignity On The Part Of Those Who Don't Do The Fighting.

Shakespeare Wouldn't Have Been Any Good If He'd Stayed In Stratford. He Had To Go To London To Be Bathed In The Full Current Of The Renaissance.

A Novel Is A Commodity That Fulfills A Certain Need; People Need To Buy Daydreams Like They Need To Buy Ice Cream Or Aspirin Or Gin. They Even Need To Buy A Pinch Of Intellectual Catnip Now And Then To Liven Up Their Thoughts.