They Did More Than Take Our Youth

The Middle Class Is Doing Fine In Fiction. But It's Not What Gets Me Going. I Love The Working Class, And Everyone From It I've Met, And Think They're Incredibly Witty, Inventive - There's A Lot Of Poetry There.

The Process Of Writing A Novel Begins With A Pang, A Moment Of Recognition, And A Situation, A Character, Or Something You Read In A Paper, That Seems To Go Off, Like A Solar Flare Inside Your Head.

Envy Never Comes To The Ball Dressed As Envy; It Comes Dressed As High Moral Standards Or Distaste For Materialism.

When I Talk About The Pleasure Principle, I Don't Say There Is Only One Kind Of Pleasure, There Are Many Kinds Of Pleasure. Some Pleasure Is Difficult. It Should Be For The Reader As Well As The Writer. But It Has To Be Pleasure.

Writers Spend Too Much Time Among Dead Things. I Thought That Was Profound And Actually True, That You're Trying To Pump Life Into Something That Is Inanimate. You See What A Sort Of Audacious Thing It Is To Move These Sort Of Imaginary People Around In A Very Stylized And Patterned World.