I have dined with Joyce and have had tea with Robbe-Grillet. Isolation means liberty and discovery. A desert island may be more exciting than a city, but my loneliness, on the whole, has little significance. As a private person I am good-natured, warm, cheerful, straightforward, plainspoken, and intolerant of bogus art. I do not mind my own writings being criticized or ignored and therefore think it funny that people not even concerned with literature should be upset by my finding D. H. Lawrence execrable or my seeing in H. G. Wells a far greater artist than Conrad.
Rowdies are never revolutionary, they are always reac' tionary.
It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests. Demonstrators at American universities care as little about education as football fans who smash up subway stations in England care about soccer. Thirty years ago I used to write in bed, dipping my pen into a bedside inkwell, or else I would compose mentally at any time of the day or night. I would fall asleep when the sparrows woke up. At the wrong time To the right place.