Not only the style, but the way in which you don't exactly know what on earth has happened or is happening till about page two hundred - then it all becomes apparent in a blinding flash.
I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is.
I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative.
There is curiously little art concerning the efficacy of reason - perhaps simply because reason is not noticeably efficacious.
It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.
After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.
To say a poem is absolute is saying nothing, because an ink blot can be absolute. Yet you put into it what you like. So it becomes totally relative.
It connects with the theologians' point that you can say what God is not, but not (easily) what He is.
For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather, every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.
In the end their appeal is not necessarily the history, but the quality of the story-telling, and a good story transcends national boundaries.