Pynchon's reply

[Keith]

[Charles Dickens] rounded it off with the dying fall of a requiem  
service, a tempered oration on why the dead deserve defending and  
cherishing--God knew, when his time came, he would. He would burn his  
letters in a bonfire; it would take most of the day. He would create  
a real double-world stranger than any of his fictions, more  
convoluted than any plot. He would bind friends from his secrets. He  
would demand confidences be kept beyond the grave.

And he would pay the cost, immense and crippling, of his ultimate  
failure to discipline his own great undisciplined heart. It would be  
the price of his soul.

       (_Wanting_ by Richard Flanagan, pp. 47-8)