The Novel Is A Game Or Joke

I Like To Be Aware Of A Book As A Piece Of Writing, And Aware Of Its Structure As A Product Of Mind, And Yet I Want To Be Able To See The Represented World Through It. I Admire Artists Who Succeed In Dividing My Attention More Or Less Evenly Between The World Of Their Books And The Art Of Their Books . . . So That A Reader May Study The Work With Pleasure As Well As The World That It Describes.

It's About Waking Up. A Child Wakes Up Over And Over Again, And Notices That She's Living. She Dreams Along, Loving The Exuberant Life Of The Senses, In Love With Beauty And Power, Oblivious To Herself -- And Then Suddenly, Bingo, She Wakes Up And Feels Herself Alive. She Notices Her Own Awareness. And She Notices That She Is Set Down Here, Mysteriously, In A Going World.

Fiction Keeps Its Audience By Retaining The World As Its Subject Matter. People Like The World. Many People Actually Prefer It To Art And Spend Their Days By Choice In The Thick Of It.

You Can't Test Courage Cautiously.

If I Actually Believed That The Progress Of Human Understanding Depended On Our Crop Of Contemporary Novelists, I Would Shoot Myself.