It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now, to give it the perfect ending, was a little of the Ludwig Van.

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

Life is a wretched gray Saturday, but it has to be lived through.

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.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.