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. Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it. All sorts of ideas and experiences I didn't recognize as mine emerged when writing. The actual time of writing, then, and not only the experiences that had gone into the writing, was really traumatic: it changed me. [...]

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 an echo as late as the Fifties, in this country, with the theme of "commitment." It is still potent in communist countries. "Bothering about your stupid personal concerns when Rome is burning" is how it tends to get itself expressed, on the level of ordinary life -- and was hard to withstand, coming from one's nearest and dearest, and from people doing everything one respected most: like, for instance, trying to fight colour prejudice in Southern Africa. Yet all the time novels, stories, art of every sort, became more and more personal. [...]

[...] 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, pleasures, emotions -- and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas -- can't be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of "subjectivity," that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience [...] into something much larger: growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

it has been a sexually contumacious time