we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.