Contrary To What People Think, I Slave

As A Younger Man I Wrote For Eight Years Without Ever Earning A Nickel Which Is A Long Apprenticeship, But In That Time I Learned A Lot About My Trade.

Contrary To What People Think, I Slave Over My Books.

I'm Not A Very Good Writer, But I'm An Excellent Rewriter.

Not Too Many People Work In A Job Where, Waiting Out There Are Three Or Four Hundred People Who Are Paid To Tear Apart What You've Done. And Often They Are Brighter Than You Are, Or They Know More About The Subject Than You Do, Or They Wish They Had Written A Book Themselves, Or Done A Lot Better. Or They Just Don't Like It! And You Have To Live With It.

I Would Suppose I Learned How To Write When I Was Very Young Indeed. When I Read A Child's Book About The Trojan War And Decided That The Greeks Were Really A Bunch Of Frauds With Their Tricky Horses And The Terrible Things They Did, Stealing One Another's Wives, And So On, So At That Very Early Age, I Re-wrote The Ending Of The Iliad So That The Trojans Won. And Boy, Achilles And Ajax Got What They Wanted, Believe Me. And Thereafter, At Frequent Intervals, I Would Write Something. It Was Really Quite Extraordinary. Never Of Very High Merit, But The Daringness Of It Was.