Activity

[...] At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about "petty personal problems" was to recognise that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasur…

The theme of "the artist" had to relate to another, subjectivity. When I began writing there was pressure on writers not to be "subjective." This pressure began inside communist movements, as a development of the social literary criticism developed in Russia [...] It spread fast eerywhere, finding …

I was so immersed in writing this book, that I didn't think about how it might be received. I was involved not merely because it was hard to write -- keeping the plan of it in my head I wrote it from start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult -- but because of what I was learning as I wrote.…

it has been a sexually contumacious time

[...] once of the reasons I wrote the novel was that I felt there are blank spaces where novels ought to be, particularly in nineteenth-century literature. For instance, I would like to read novels that give the taste and flavour of the Chartists, and their personal lives, their discussions, their …