If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.

I do my thinking while I walk. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk.

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

That's the way it is: life inculdes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.

Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought.