Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

I did think of becoming a priest quite late on, when other boys were thinking of knocking over fences and going out with girls. I would have made a very good bishop: nice housekeeper, nice clothes - god, the clothes.

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.