But what I do I do because I like to do. - Anthony Burgess

There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory.

- from the introduction of the 1986 Norton edition

[H]ighly ambitious work...continuing power....vast novel...told over eighty-one chapters by an eighty-one-year-old pederast Catholic writer-narrator...summed up the literary, social and moral history of the century with comic richness as well as encyclopedic knowingness.