Bokelskere.no

I was finding it extraordinary how throughout the period I had been working on the novel, right from Chapter One, characters and situations, images and phrases that I absolutely needed for the book simply appeared as if from nowhere into my range of perception.

I’ve come to learn for myself how little one needs, in the art of writing, to convey the lot, and how a lot of words, on the other hand, can convey so little.

I said, ‘Dottie’s sort of the general reader in my mind.’
‘Fuck the general reader,’ Solly said, ‘because in fact the general reader doesn’t exist.’
‘That’s what I say,’ Edwina yelled. ‘Just fuck the general reader. No such person.’
I liked to be lucid. So long as Dottie took in what I wrote I didn’t care whether she disapproved or not.

The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story, and the methods are mythological by nature.

One day in the middle of the twentieth century I sat in an old graveyard which had not yet been demolished, in the Kensington area of London, when a young policeman stepped off the path and came over to me.

At the meeting I gave close attention to the six members without ever actually studying them with my eyes. I always preferred what I saw out of the corners of my eyes, so to speak.