He Didn't Want To Please His Readers.

When I Talk About The Pleasure Principle, I Don't Say There Is Only One Kind Of Pleasure, There Are Many Kinds Of Pleasure. Some Pleasure Is Difficult. It Should Be For The Reader As Well As The Writer. But It Has To Be Pleasure.

Language Leads A Double Life - And So Does The Novelist. You Chat With Family And Friends, You Attend To Your Correspondence, You Consult Menus And Shopping Lists, You Observe Road Signs, And So On. Then You Enter Your Study, Where Language Exists In Quite Another Form - As The Stuff Of Patterned Artifice.

I Think It's Likely That The Civilizing Effect Of Literature Has Done Most Of The Work, And Still Continues To Do. Look At Steven Pinker's Book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It Proves Beyond Any Shadow Of Doubt That Violence Has Declined Dramatically Throughout The Centuries. There Are Various Reasons For It: The Rise Of The State, Leviathan, The Monopoly Of Violence, Children's Rights, Animal Rights. They're All Positive Signs.

The Literary Interview Won't Tell You What A Writer Is Like. Far More Compellingly To Some, It Will Tell You What A Writer Is Like To Interview.

Perhaps There Are Other Bits Of My Life That Would Take On Content, Take On Shadow, If Only I Read More And Thought Less About Money.