As an admirer of all adventures of the spirit and rebellions of the mind and heart, I am full of admiration for anyone who despises the sentence ‘The Marquise went out at five o’clock’, yet I am convinced that there is more art and more life in that sentence than in a muffled crunch of sand with no human footprints or human voice. As an admirer of experiments and suffering, faithful to the idea of rebelling against convention, I draw the line at stammering, even if I am obliged to start my own novel with the sentence: ‘This morning I found human footprints in the sand.’
