Self-consciousness Is The Destroyer Of Erotic Joy.

I Watched Our Friends' Wary, Intelligent Faces Droop At Our Tale. Their Shock Was A Mere Shadow Of Our Own, Resembling More The Goodwilled Imitation Of That Emotion, And For This Reason It Was A Temptation To Exaggerate, To Throw A Rope Of Superlatives Across The Abyss That Divided Experience From Its Representation By Anecdote.

When They Kissed She Immediately Felt His Tongue, Tensed And Strong, Pushing Past Her Teeth, Like Some Bully Shouldering His Way Into A Room. Entering Her.

Novelists Have To Be Adept At Controlling The Flow Of Information, And, Most Crucially, They Have To Be In Charge Of The Narrative.

I Was The Basest Of Readers. All I Wanted Was My Own World, And Myself In It, Given Back To Me In Artful Shapes And Accessible Form.

London In The '70s Was A Pretty Catastrophic Dump, I Can Tell You. We Had Every Kind Of Industrial Trouble; We Had Severe Energy Problems; We Were Under Constant Terrorist Attack From Irish Terrorist Groups Who Had Started A Bombing Campaign In English Cities; Politics Were Fantastically Polarized Between Left And Right.