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

A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse.

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

And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip music brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries.

Rome's just a city like anywhere else. A vastly overrated city, I'd say. It trades on belief just as Stratford trades on Shakespeare.

If I had died it would have been even better for you political bratchnies, would it not, pretending and treacherous droogs as you are.' But all that came out was er er er.