Novel Writing Wrecks Homes.

I Must Be Like The Princess Who Felt The Pea Through Seven Mattresses; Each Book Is A Pea.

When I Die There May Be A Paragraph Or Two In The Newspapers. My Name Will Linger In The British Museum Reading Room Catalogue For A Space At The Head Of A Long List Of Books For Which No One Will Ever Ask.

I Thank God Daily For The Good Fortune Of My Birth, For I Am Certain I Would Have Made A Miserable Peasant.

The Fools Ran After Me And I Ran After The Whores, Foolish Though I Realized Such A Proceeding To Be.

Clairvoyant, Hornblower Could Foresee That In A Year's Time, The World Would Hardy Remember The Incident. In Twenty Years, It Would Be Entirely Forgotten. Yet Those Headless Corpses Up There In Muzillac; Those Shattered Redcoats; Those Frenchmen Caught In The Four-pounder's Blast Of Canister -- They Were As Dead As If It Had Been A Day In Which History Had Been Changed.