Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival.

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later.

When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.

Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.

These rejections hurt me terribly because I felt it was my life that was being rejected.

I'm an atheist, I always thought, 'This is it.' If there is going to be a heaven, it should be on earth. I feel much happier than most people. I'm fairly stoic about death, but I'm not keen on dying if it's going to be long and protracted. I don't have dark nights of the soul, except occasionally. I'm such a little busy bee.