Once The Working Classes Were In Chains,

I'm Very Happy For Whatever Plaudits Might Come The Way Of My Work, But I Never Ever Sit Down To Write X With Y In View - Whether It's A Reader, A Prize Or A Sale.

Ideologists Of All Kinds Find A Strange Sort Of Comfort In The Madness Of The Crowd; It Confirms Them In Their Suspicion That History, Far From Being Made By The Great Mass Of Individuals - As Marx Averred - Is Rather Unmade By A Single Massive Individual, A Collective Other, Who Stands In Stark Contrast To You And He.

Television Is The Same As The Telephone, And The Same As The World Wide Web For That Matter. People Who Become Obsessed By The Peculiarities Of These Communications Media Have Simply Failed To Adjust To The Shock Of The Old. People Who Bleat On About The 'artistic' Potential Of Television Qua Television Are Equally Deluded.

The British And American Literary Worlds Operate In An Odd Kind Of Symbiosis: Our Critics Think Our Contemporary Novelists Are Not The Stuff Of Greatness Whereas Certain Contemporary Americans Indubitably Are. Their Critics Often Advance The Exact Opposite: British Fiction Is Cool, American Naff.

In Truth, Even If They Have An Imperfect Insight Into Their Own Methods, I Still Slightly Mistrust Writers Of Fiction Who Are Assured Literary Critics; It Makes Me Suspect That They Favour The Word Over The World It Should Describe. Such Scribes Fall Victim Too Easily To The Solecism Of Equating Style With Morality.