The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

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.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

What's it going to be then, eh?

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986