If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

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

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

Alex like groweth up, Oh Yes.

Death comes along like a gas bill one can't pay.

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.

To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.