Sometimes I Think What I Write Is

Very Few People Really Care About Freedom, About Liberty, About The Truth, Very Few. Very Few People Have Guts, The Kind Of Guts On Which A Real Democracy Has To Depend. Without People With That Sort Of Guts A Free Society Dies Or Cannot Be Born.

I Have Kept Diaries, Of Course, But They Can't Be Read For Quite A Long Time. I'm Always Curious About People Who Are Fascinated By Writers' Lives. It Seems To Me That We're Always In Our Books, Quite Nakedly. I Wonder, Too, Does The Private Life Really Matter? Who Cares What Is Known About You And What Isn't? Even When You Make Public Something That's Been Private, Most People Don't Get It - Not Unless They're The Same Generation And Have Gone Through More Or Less The Same Experiences. So, In A Sense, We're All Private, By Definition.

There Is No Doubt Fiction Makes A Better Job Of The Truth.

It Is Not Always Possible To Know, When You Make A Note Of An Event, Or A State Of Mind, How This May Strike Someone Perhaps Ten Thousand Years Later.

Most Novels, If They Are Successful At All, Are Original In The Sense That They Report The Existence Of An Area Of Society, A Type Of Person, Not Yet Admitted To The General Literate Consciousness.