IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.