Life is a very orderly thing but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.
I have more freedom when I write fiction but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one is conveyed better in this form.
Those who write the editorials and those who write the columns they simply are unaccountable. They're free to impose their cultural politics in the name of freedom of the press.
I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.
But I don't think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can't create his own Interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that's written he becomes mechanical he has no freedom.
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
To become self-aware people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic but fundamental right. Without it human beings are reduced to automatons.
Who is more to be pitied a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
When people talk of the freedom of writing speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.