A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.
I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.
It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.
