Write A Book You'd Like To Read.

When You Become Published And Become A Reviewer, Piles Of Books Come Along And You Are Pushed By Fashion And What You Are Commissioned To Do.

To A Brit Of My Generation, One Of The Most Objectionable Things About [margaret] Thatcher Is Her Falsity. She Is A Total Construct. For One Thing, She Had A Made-over Accent.

Fiction Isn't Made By Scraping The Bones Of Topicality For The Last Shreds And Sinews, To Be Processed Into Mechanically Recovered Prose. Like Journalism, It Deals In Ideas As Well As Facts, But Also In Metaphors, Symbols And Myths.

When You Have Committed Enough Words To Paper, You Feel You Have A Spine Stiff Enough To Stand Up In The Wind. But When You Stop Writing, You Find That's All You Are - A Spine, A Row Of Rattling Vertebrae, Dried Out Like An Old Quill Pen.

This Was An Idea Peculiar To Camille, Maximilien Thought, That The Worse Things Get, The Better They Get. No One Else Seems To Think This Way.