Is It Better For A Man To

One Goes On Writing Partly Because It Is The Only Available Way Of Earning A Living. It Is A Hard Way And Highly Competitive. My Heart Drops Into My Bowels When I Enter A Bookshop And See How Fierce The Competition Is...there Is Also A Privier Reason For Pushing On, And That Is The Hopeless Hope That Someday That Intractable Enemy Language Will Yield To The Struggle To Control It... Mastery Never Comes, And One Serves A Lifelong Apprenticeship. The Writer Cannot Retire From The Battle; He Dies Fighting.

We Can Destroy What We Have Written, But We Cannot Unwrite It.

But What I Do I Do Because I Like To Do.

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

If He Can Only Perform Good Or Only Perform Evil, Then He Is A Clockwork Orange—meaning That He Has The Appearance Of An Organism Lovely With Colour And Juice But Is In Fact Only A Clockwork Toy To Be Wound Up By God Or The Devil.