How Lovely This World Is, Really: One

Critics Sometimes Appear To Be Addressing Themselves To Works Other Than Those I Remember Writing.

Budapest In Late May Is A City Of Lilacs. The Sweet, Languid, Rather Sleepy Smell Of Lilacs Wafts Everywhere. And It Is A City Of Lovers, Many Of Them Quite Middle-aged. Walking With Their Arms Around Each Other, Embracing And Kissing On Park Benches. A Sensuousness Very Much Bound Up (it Seems To Me) With The Heady Ubiquitous Smell Of Lilacs.

I Never Really Knew I Wanted To 'be' A Writer, But I Was Always Writing From A Very Young Age. It Became More Conscious As An Ideal When I Was In My Twenties.

To Write A Novel Is To Embark On A Quest That Is Very Romantic. People Have Visions, And The Next Step Is To Execute Them. That's A Very Romantic Project. Like Edvard Munch's Strange Dreamlike Canvases Where People Are Stylized, Like 'the Scream.' Munch Must Have Had That Vision In A Dream, He Never Saw It.

For Politics Is In Its Essence As Adams Had Said, The 'systematic Organization Of Hatred': Either You Were Organized Or You Were Not.