The Times, 28 June 1962

I think I always read purely for pleasure, or rather my intention in reading is always to find pleasure. I used sometimes to struggle on with a book I disliked because I felt I ought to read it, but I do this no longer. I have no scholarly impulse and lack the perseverance, or perhaps simply the intellectual capacity, to read for the purpose of acquiring knowledge; also, being a slow worker, and because my work is of the kind that can be done at any time, reading has become an almost guilty pleasure, indulged in when I feel I should be working – or is this an excuse for having read so little?

It accounts, anyhow, for lacunae that I hardly dare admit, and yet to read later in life something that one ought to have read long ago can be doubly rewarding. For example, until recently I had never read Hardy – the novels, I mean. Reading them now I find something that I might well have been unable to assimilate earlier. It is more than pleasure, for they are concerned with things that are universally human and common to all mankind, completely transcending, as does Shakespeare, any feeling of period. It is the absence of this quality that worries me about so many contemporary novels. It cannot be replaced, I feel, by studies of psychological cases, and I lose interest in the complex interrelationships of characters who never really come alive.