Life Is, Of Course, Terrible.

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.

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.

Every Grain Of Experience Is Food For The Greedy Growing Soul Of The Artist.

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

The Trombones Crunched Redgold Under My Bed, And Behind My Gulliver The Trumpets Three-wise Silverflamed, And There By The Door The Timps Rolling Through My Guts And Out Again Crunched Like Candy Thunder. Oh, It Was Wonder Of Wonders. And Then, A Bird Of Like Rarest Spun Heavenmetal, Or Like Silvery Wine Flowing In A Spaceship, Gravity All Nonsense Now, Came The Violin Solo Above All The Other Strings, And Those Strings Were Like A Cage Of Silk Around My Bed. Then Flute And Oboe Bored, Like Worms Of Like Platinum, Into The Thick Thick Toffee Gold And Silver. I Was In Such Bliss, My Brothers.