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.

I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.

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

Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.