But what I do I do because I like to do.

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

Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.

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

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

I didn't think; I experimented.

The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation.