Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own.

And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.

I blundered into writing.

That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.