That is no small or simple thing – all our moral and social pretensions rest upon it. Where else can you have such licence of expression? Where else can you combine so richly and intimately the world of ideas with the world of concrete reality? And where else can you know – or at least hope – that for each individual reader, each act of collaboration between author and reader, the experience will be something different? I have enormous faith in that invisible collaborative experience, though when I write I never think of the reader.įiction seems to me only to do in a specialised, concentrated way what we all need to do: to enter, in our minds, experiences other than our own. I have no wariness about the potential of fiction as such, or the privilege and joy (despite many an agony!) of writing it. ‘If I have any abiding allegiance in my writing it is to the power of the imagination, and I hope my imagination will always surprise and stretch me and take me along unsuspected paths, just as I hope it will continue to bring me up against certain things which I will have to recognise as my own peculiar territory – though that too is a process of discovery, not of preconception.
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