Julian Barnes

So I sort of pinched them.

A reader has absolute liberty to like or not like your book and to say you shouldn't have written it this way.

You should have written it that.

But usually the complaints and the corrections to it fall on rather deaf ears with most writers.

What you're putting in there is something that you've thought about, you've written a number of times, and you've corrected it and corrected it and corrected it.

So it is what you mean to say.

Yes, when I thought I had a more serious version of it, I decided to write a little sort of memoir, notes to myself in my notebook.

And this is, it only reached about two and a half pages, but these are some of the entries.

Yes, that's correct.

This is the start of the ending.

I live in the present, but my future is to exist only in the past.

The writer quarantined in his own home, suddenly victim of blood cancer, while all around a plague is spreading exponentially.

It sounds like a bad or at least derivative novel.

And yet there are promising themes.

Thus, he is meticulous about self-isolation because he doesn't want to die of coronavirus.

He'd much rather die of blood cancer.

It's not just the timescale of it.

Three weeks to a strangulating Covid death, which is very nasty to watch, let alone suffer, according to A&E specialists.

He would rather die of his own disease, thank you very much, not everybody else's.

and without yet knowing its ramifications or the nature of its end, he prefers to have blood cancer.