Come with uncle and hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones...you are invited!

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute.... This point of election... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

But we were all feeling that bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure.