Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Novelists... fashioning nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.

Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.

Confidence is something one acquires. It can come early or late but it is impossible to write without it. Mine came late.

Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

There is no real escape from autobiography into biography. The self has to be faced, or we die.