What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
John wrote with a very deep love for the human race and a concern for its future.
I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.
Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.
I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.
John's time and effort were, in the main, spent on pretty honorable stuff. As for the other side, well, nobody's perfect, nobody's Jesus. And look what they did to him.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales.
The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.
There was no saying I could ever step in and do what John does, because it'd be really hard to be John Williams.