The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?

I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

Music… is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.

If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

As you go along, you literally collect places. I'm fed up with going to places; I shan't go to anymore.