Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

One does not remember the winners. One remains haunted by the losers.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

She didn't like to be talked about. Equally, she didn't like not to be talked about, when the high-minded chatter rushed on as though she was not there. There was no pleasing her, in fact. She had the grace, even at eleven, to know there was no pleasing her. She thought a lot, analytically, about other people's feelings, and had only just begun to realize that this was not usual, and not reciprocated.

As a little girl, I didn't like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilisers.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.