Last paragraph: Q: It sometimes seems to me that in your
novels - in Laughter in the Dark for instance - there is a strain of perversity
amounting to cruelty.
VN: I don't know. Maybe. Some
of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they
are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade -
demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out. Actually, I'm
a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.