What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.