The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.

I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.

I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.

I wouldn't have thought that the techniques of story-telling, which is what the novel is after all, can vary much because there are two things involved.There's a story and there's a listener, whose attention you have to keep. Now the only way in which you can keep a reader's attention to a story is in his wanting to know what is going to happen next. This puts a fairly close restriction on the method you must use.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.