When the State withers, humanity flowers.

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

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

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

Colonialism. The enforced spread of the rule of reason. But who is going to spread it among the colonizers?

Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this surprising visit?