One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is...There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that someday that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it... Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting.

I've always felt that English women had to be approached in a sisterly manner, rather than an erotic manner.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

Put it off for a bit. All life is putting off. Well, not entirely.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.