All I knew was that I was writing something out of my very guts, and that I was content. |
Give me the comma of imperfect striving, thus to find zest in the immediate living. Ever the reaching but never the gaining, ever the climbing but never the attaining of the mountain top. |
I have been told of the many extra advantages of word-processing, and I acknowledge them. But, apart from other reasons, I find that a sentence, a page, a book, assumes a different nature when it is first in manuscript, second in typescript, and third in page proofs. |
I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy. |
I have never been clever enough - or egotistical enough to spend 300 pages dipping into the sludge of my own subconscious. |
Perfection is a full stop. |
What I was writing was not a planned thing, it was organic, with the characters working out their own destiny. Sitting there in the grey old empty bungalow, I felt like a man driving a coach and four, roughly knowing the direction in which the coach would travel, but being pulled along by forces only just under his control. |