In his little book on D.H.Lawrence Frank Kermode says that Lawrence's novels do not have a design on us. There are, to be sure, dogmas in them, the dogmas of Lawrence's treatises and letters; but, says Kermode, in the novels the ideas are made to submit to life. Lawrence himself said that the novel is the highest form of human experience precisely because the novel is ‘so incapable of the absolute... in a novel there is always a tom-cat, a black tom-cat which pounces on the white dove of the Word’.

Iris Murdoch, philosopher and novelist, said this (in a novel): ‘If a truth is complicated, you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie’.