Self-consciousness Is The Destroyer Of Erotic Joy.

How Can A Novelist Achieve Atonement When, With Her Absolute Power Of Deciding Outcomes, She Is Also God? There Is No One, No Entity Or Higher Form That She Can Appeal To, Or Be Reconciled With, Or That Can Forgive Her. There Is Nothing Outside Her. In Her Imagination She Has Set The Limits And The Terms. No Atonement For God, Or Novelists, Even If They Are Atheists. It Was Always An Impossible Task, And That Was Precisely The Point. The Attempt Was All.

What Reader Wants To Be Told What Attitude To Strike?

I'm Delighted When People Respond With Passion And Readily Intensity To My Work. Literature Is Not As The Economist Would Put It A Positional Good; In Other Words, There Is Infinite Space For Good Literature.

I'm Sorry To Say That Far Worse Things Have Happened And The Literature Of The Holocaust Is A Witness To The Capacity Of The Novel As A Form.

However, Withered, I Still Feel Myself To Be Exactly The Same Person I've Always Been. Hard To Explain That To The Young. We May Look Truly Reptilian, But We're Not A Separate Tribe.