It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year.
I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I'll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence.
Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.
The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.
I've yet to meet somebody who said, 'Your stories are so revolting I couldn't read them.'