Anthony Burgess, Homage to Qwerty Yuiop

When I took up, twenty-eight years ago, the novelist's career, I became aware that this entailed the abandonment of any dormant inclinations to scholarship I possessed. Fiction is a lying craft and it has no pretensions to exact knowledge. Plausibility is very nearly all. A novelist may check in a cheap encyclopedia such objective data--details of the sinking of the Titanic, the formula for sodium glutamate--as he needs for his narrative, but his art is a very tentative one and depends largely on guesswork as to how the human mind operates.