The Job Of The Novel Is To

I Woke Up Thinking A Very Pleasant Thought. There Is Lots Left In The World To Read.

One's Head Is Finite. You Pour More And More Things Into It - Surnames, Chronologies, Affiliations - And It Packs Them Away In Its Tunnels, And Eventually You Find That You Have A Book About Something That You Publish.

History Isn't A Seesaw. If You Have A Really Bad Regime On One Side, The Actions On The Other Side Don't Automatically Become Good. It Doesn't Work That Way.

People Don't Like To Read Text On Computer Screens (and Reading A Lot Of Text On Ipod Screens Gets Very Tiring Very Soon, Just About As Soon As Running Out Of Battery Power).

A Problem That I Have With Everything Fictional Is That Writers Are Always Having To Come Up With Sudden Artillery Explosions In The Middle Of Whatever Is Going On. The Characters Are Having Interesting, Subtle Interactions, Or Jealousies, Or Whatever It Is, And Suddenly Some Gigantic Angry Eruption Has To Happen, A Giant Gasp Where Everyone Has To Scramble Around. That's The Point Where I'm Turned Off. I Want The Dynamic Range To Be A Little Smaller. I Don't Like The Big False Bangs.