Americans Will Listen, But They Do Not

If You Write Fiction You Are, In A Sense, Corrupted. There's A Tremendous Corruptibility For The Fiction Writer Because You're Dealing Mainly With Sex And Violence. These Remain The Basic Themes, They're The Basic Themes Of Shakespeare Whether You Like It Or Not.

Language Exists Less To Record The Actual Than To Liberate The Imagination.

A Character, To Be Acceptable As More Than A Chess Piece, Has To Be Ignorant Of The Future, Unsure About The Past, And Not At All Sure Of What He's Supposed To Be Doing.

The Adult Relation To Books Is One Of Absorbing Rather Than Being Absorbed.

The Book I Am Best Known For, Or Only Known For, Is A Novel I Am Prepared To Repudiate: Written A Quarter Of A Century Ago, A Jeu D'esprit Knocked Off For Money In Three Weeks, It Became Known As The Raw Material For A Film Which Seemed To Glorify Sex And Violence. The Film Made It Easy For Readers Of The Book To Misunderstand What It Was About, And The Misunderstanding Will Pursue Me Till I Die. I Should Not Have Written The Book Because Of This Danger Of Misinterpretation.