Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

Memory must be patchy; what is more alarming is its face-savingness. Something in one shrinks from catching it out - unique to oneself, one's own, one's claim to identity, it implicates one's identity in its fibbing.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

Imagination of my kind is most caught, most fired, most worked upon by the unfamiliar: I have thrivenon the changes and chances, the dislocations andcontrasts which have made up so much of my life.

Someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.