Novelists are perhaps the last people in the world to be entrusted with opinions. The nature of a novel is that it has no opinions, only the dialectic of contrary views, some of which, all of which, may be untenable and even silly. A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

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

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

You don't say, 'I've done it!' You come, with a kind of horrible desperation, to realize that this will do.

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

... A CLOCKWORK ORANGE- and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen-

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.