Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.

To write a novel is always to go naked, whatever you're writing about. You always reveal yourself.

Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.